AutoHotkey
Dekaritae
www.autohotkey.com
Discovered this gem earlier today. It's a scripted hotkey program for
Windows, which means you can use it to bind hotkeys to a series of
commands. These can be as diverse as sending a window message to
GetRight to pause all downloads, or performing an adrenaline move in
UT2004.
Thing is, don't need to use a prefix key; can bind scripts to any
combination of keys, like thus:
Numpad0 & Numpad1::ShiftAltTab
Numpad0 & Numpad2::AltTab
Shift & WheelDown::AltTab
Shift & WheelUp::ShiftAltTab
(I have the thumb button on my mouse bound to shift, but could just as
easily use RButton & WheelDown or Up)
But the most brilliant feature of this program, is that the keys don't
have to be pressed at the same time. Example:
:*:ms`t::http://maur.shellscape.org/screenshots/
Which means whenever I type ms and press tab, it will replace that with
the text http://maur.shellscape.org/screenshots/, in any text field in
any program.
I've been playing with it pretty much all night, setting up various
auto-replacements. It appears even to be possible to set up hotkeys and
hotstrings on a per-program or window class basis.
:*:brb`t:Be right back.
:*:<d`t::<div class=""></div>{Left 8}
; -- Puts the caret between the quotes
:*:``sd::
IfWinActive, Opera
Send {F8}http://www.slashdot.org/{Enter}
else
IfWinActive, Mozilla
Send !dhttp://www.slashdot.org/{Enter}
else
Send ``sd
return
return
; -- It uses ` as the default escape character, so ``sd is typed as
`sd)
Ctrl & 1::
SetKeyDelay, -1
IfWinActive, Open, File &name
Send, {Home}+{End}^x!nd:\dropbox\{Enter}{Backspace}^v{Home}+{End}
else IfWinActive, Save, File &name
Send, {Home}+{End}^x!nd:\dropbox\{Enter}{Backspace}^v{Home}+{End}
return
; -- This functions like a bookmark, for all Open and Save (As)
dialogs. It erases the current contents of the clipboard, though, but I
think I can fix that.
buzzmodo
let you name events like this with your own words, acronyms or just
letters, and you can trigger them application and context free.
quiksan
I used it for about a month at my last job (buzz even called me and
walked me through a personal demo - thanks buzz!). One of my tasks was
to handle tier 3 help desk requests. with the HD being pretty lame, I
usually got the same questions, so I had a text file with all the
responses I would email out. With Active Words, i assigned a few
letter monicker to each chunk of text (a page long in some instances)
then just typed that monicker into the email and it would paste the
response for me. no opening the text file, copying the right entry,
switching back to my email, pasting, etc. just one quick keystroke.
course this is a pretty basic example of what it does - it's SO
powerful. everyone using a windows system should check it out.
buzzmodo
We are beginning to get a lot of traction in tech support. I was in CA
last week, and met with two companies using ActiveWords all the time to
handle that kind of stuff.
They are doing the same thing you talked about, i.e. naming a response,
and then just their internal name for the response and whammo it is
gone.
Buzz
Dekaritae
buzzmodo wrote:
> Look at our product, i.e. ActiveWords, http://www.activewords.com/ .
We
> let you name events like this with your own words, acronyms or just
> letters, and you can trigger them application and context free.
>
> Buzz
> bu...@activewords.com
Ay, that's a rather clever idea, especially for tech support workers. I
don't need to keep large amounts of text at hand, but for what text I
do need I've been using a clipboard caching called ArsClip.
Right now I'm finding myself drawn to the non-obvious uses for this
type of software. I've used AutoHotkey to map MiddleMouse+LeftMouse to
'Ctrl+V', and MiddleMouse+RightMouse to 'Ctrl+X', which is amazingly
useful now.