Report of Autokey-Qt in Ubuntu 12.04 / Unity

[Chris Kelley]

Hi everyone,

This is my 1st time posting here. I've been using Autokey since before there was a -gtk or -qt. And I really love how it adds to my productivity. One thing I've always liked is using Autokey for program launching. While researching my upgrade to 12.04 (from 10.04) I noted the change to -Qt and also many posts in this group about autokey NOT being a launcher...

First off, 12.04 is a very heavy operating system. I consider a Core2Duo E5500 with 4G of RAM to be a fairly good computer. In Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04, this hardware was more than adequate. In 12.04, the UI slowed to a crawl. It was so slow that I had to accomodate for the deletion of the hotkey for my text insertion macros in Autokey!!

I never thought I was a hardware snob... :( So I ran out and got a Core i7 Since Fry's has them on sale. Suddenly, Autokey wakes right up! I have to re-edit my scripts so that they don't delete the initial hotkey from script evocation! With the UI actually working now, I sought after the "launcher" issue. With some help on StackOverflow, I was able to find a way to get Autokey to actually launch my programs the way I want...

    #Enter script code

    import thread

    thread.start_new_thread(os.system,('gedit',))

See, as part of my workflow, I have and editor, word processor, and spreadsheet mapped to <super>+e, <shift>+<super>+e, and <ctrl>+<super>+e, respectively. I use gedit, OO Writer, and OO Calc for these. It's super useful for when I'm researching and need text snippets, or to "translate" HTML into plain text to paste from the web to an email. Or sometimes I need the other programs to do stuff.

I hope sharing these two thoughts helps! 

Recap: 

1) 12.04 is heavy and the behavior of autokey changes between a slow CPU and faster one.

2) Autokey can indeed be a launcher.

Thanks,

Chris

[Fred Niggle]

Just a note about hardware requirements for ubuntu 12.04... I have no problems with 32 bit running on a Celeron 1100Mhz with 2Gb of ram,so Im not convinced that you *need* such a fast cpu for Autokey to function correctly.

Otherwise, its good to hear from someone having good experiences with what is now one of my favourite programs :-)

Best Regards,

Fred 

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[Peter Weber]

Thanks for the post, Chris, this was helpful in solving my own twist on this. I've long used autokey as a super-fast app switcher by setting up specific keyboard shortcuts to run commands like 'wmctrl -a " - Mozilla Thunderbird"'. What I'd been missing was the ability to start the application if it wasn't already running without setting up a separate script or locking up autokey. I finally came up with a solution that works after finding this post, so I wanted to share.

# START
import os
import subprocess

procresult = os.system('wmctrl -a " - Mozilla Thunderbird"')

if procresult != 0:
    subprocess.Popen("/usr/bin/thunderbird")
# END

This little script will switch to Thunderbird if it's running, but will then launch it if it's not. This works for most situations, but if there are multiple possibilities for the window title you can, of course, add another attempt at wmctrl before launching the program itself.

Thanks again for sharing!