Auto Hot Key to remove life's little frictions
AHK for Beginners
In AHK you can map keystrokes to automations in Windows. It's a great place to start with coding because the language that it uses is very natural. Often when you look at the script you can read along with what is happening.
Example Scripts
Example 1: Show me the latest news about Britney Spears, and play Britney's greatest hits.
!b::run % "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7KuOuL_Ajc&ab_channel=LCSMoreira"run % "https://www.google.com/search?q=britney+spears+news"Return
When I press ALT + b , launch web searches , End
Example 2: Every time I start a new project I set up that same filling system to keep it organised. This automation lets me create those files with one keypress, and keeps my naming conventions consistent.
!numpad1:InputBox, Name, Project name send, ^NFormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, yyyy-MM-ddSendInput %CurrentDateTime%Send, " " %name%Send {enter}send, ^Nsend, %name% Importsend, {enter}send, ^Nsend, Workingsend, {enter}send, ^Nsend, Resourcessend, {enter}send, ^Nsend, Exportsend, {enter}send, {UP 3}send, {enter}return:
When I press ALT + 1 , Open a input box to set the project name, create new folder, get today's date, type today's date and project name, Open that folder, create four folders inside of that, open the top folder, End
AHK teaches problem solving
What I love about AHK is when I run the script I can see it working in real-time, I could also add sleep functions to slow down the process so I can see exactly what is happening, so you can normally see real-time where you've gone wrong.
Not only is it a great entry-level tool, but I have also used AHK to remove weekly reporting procedures, it works really well as an extension to VBA and can be used to capture data, you can send mouse clicks to coordinates or to specific pixel clusters. You can save files, run programs.
The online community is huge and most problems can be solved with a quick google search. There is a large catalog of prebuilt community tools I have running including, screenshot management, autocorrect tools, symbol inserting, music tools, premiere pro automation. I must use 30 plus script runs a day.
AHK taught me the problem-solving skills it takes when working with coding languages, 99% of the time something will not be working because of a tiny mistake, learning to check the details before trying to move the mountain.
