Drang's TextExpander abbreviation design blog post years ago that I've carried over to many of my script triggers. The semicolon isn't necessary, but it's a trick I learned from Dr. When you type that string and press Space, AutoHotKey expands it to Visual Studio Magazine. Once the file is saved, right-click it and select Run Script, which enables the script. Type this example in your script file and save it: If you prefer, you can edit the file in any plain text programming editor.Įxpansions are simply two colons, the trigger text, two more colons, and the expansion or replacement text, all on one line, like this: Right-click the file and select Edit Script to open the file in the built-in AutoHotKey editor. Under the covers, however, it's just a text file. ahk extension is important - it identifies the file as an AutoHotKey script. The most basic type of automation you can accomplish with AutoHotKey is text expansion: You type a key combination or phrase and AutoHotKey replaces it with the text you specify in your script.Ĭreate a new file in your Documents folder called vsm.ahk. Context Menu Script Commands for AutoHotKeyĪt this point trying to run AutoHotKey should just bring up the help because you don't have any scripts to run yet. Once that finishes, you'll have some new commands in Finder, including a New | AutoHotKey Script command and Run Script, Compile Script and Edit Script commands when you right-click on a script file (see Figure 1). Unless you have some special needs - and as a first-time user, you probably don't - the current Unicode 32-bit version should be perfectly fine. As I write this, v1.1.22.00 is the current version.
Grab the latest release version of AutoHotKey from the Web site and install it.
I'll cover some basics quickly here as a primer, but I recommend reading through those guides, which cover some gotchas and provide a bit more context, as well as hitting the Tutorials section of the AutoHotkey Forum and StackOverflow questions on AutoHotKey for tips. Another useful resource is evamarie's Auto Hotkey tutorial for absolute beginners at. The obvious place to start is " AutoHotkey Beginner Tutorial" in the official documentation. You'll find many tutorials spread around the Internet, but not all are created equal, and I found quite a few that used outdated script formats. In addition, many AutoHotKey tutorials attempt to cover too many features initially, making the learning process akin to mastering a new programming language. While AutoHotKey can be incredibly powerful once you understand the extensive capabilities of its macro language and deep integration with the OS, those "anything's possible" capabilities make for a steep initial learning curve. So let's take a step back and cover some of the basics first. This is a seriously sophisticated tool, and you can quickly find yourself deep in the weeds.
Or, going the other way, you can call AutoHotKey scripts from external code including C#, Visual Basic, VBScript and VBA. In addition, you can use AutoHotKey to call into DLLs, access memory addresses, interact with COM objects and more. AutoHotKey can also parse data feeds, and you can even create graphical interfaces to accept input for your scripts. Some more advanced capabilities of AutoHotKey include scripting keystrokes, menu selections, and mouse actions, which you might use for, say, GUI testing. In practice, many people use AutoHotKey for tasks such as text expansion, mapping keys and mouse clicks to shortcuts or other actions, and launching programs.
Technically, AutoHotKey is a scripting language and interpreter that enables you to automate actions within Windows and installed actions. Let's take a look at how this amazing tool works and get a taste of how it might simplify aspects of your daily development tasks. In the Windows world, one automation tools reigns supreme: AutoHotKey.
Many of them are quite polished and highly capable within their respective niches.
The Mac OS world has a wide selection of keyboard automation and text expansion tools to choose from, each of which typically specializes in providing a specific niche of macro or automation functionality. I should write a program automating it!"? How many times have you said to yourself, "I spend a lot of time on this task.
And I'd bet programmers know this better than anyone, because automating tasks is both free (discounting employer cost of automation "R&D" time) and, often, curiously challenging. Anyone who's had to perform the same mindless task over and over - or mindlessly forgot to perform an important-but-tedious task correctly - knows the value of automation.