I really love AutoHotkey but some people are still confused as to how you can get it to work for you. After my article about it in the recent issue of Ping! Zine I have had a few questions so I thought I would touch on the basics here for all to see. Here are the basics you need once you get it installed.
Right click on the desktop, select “New” and then “AutoHotkey Script”.
On the desktop icon created for the script, I want you to right-click on it and select “Edit Script”. This should open up a Notepad window with your empty script inside. Go to the Notepad window, hit enter twice so you are on a new line. Next I want you to type in the following:
c:testscript::
Now this is telling your script that the word “testscript” is your keyword to type to get your longer response to launch. Next add some text to the end of that – such as…
Now that you got that text typed into there I want you to go to “File” and then “Save” to save your script. Now lets go back to the desktop where you created your quick response, and double click the icon created on your desktop to launch it. You should see the green box with the “H” in it in your taskbar now.
Now go into any text field, e-mail, search box, anything and type in testscript then hit enter after typing it in. Presto – you just saved yourself a few more seconds in your day. You can now quickly type out phrases you use multiple times in the day and save your keyboard (and fingers) from all that extra work.
[...] – In my bag of tricks, AutoHotkey is most likely to be the most used one of them all. Thanks to a little simple script writing I can now type in a few characters instead of a two paragraphed e-mail each time I answer a [...]