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Over the last several years I've been dealing with various stages of disability thanks to ALS. My goal is to share solutions and review various products/tools/devices that I have found particularly helpful.

Sunday 24 June 2012

More Autohotkey Goodness

While paying one of my many visits to life hacker, which is one of my favorite sites they posted some new stuff for autohotkey scripts. I was really impressed with both of these scripts, they're too good not to share.

The first, is really a great way to get started with autohotkey. What life hacker has done, is created a webpage which will automatically generate your first autohotkey scripts allowing you to bind all sorts of commands to various buttons on the keyboard that don't really see a lot the use on a day-to-day basis. Not only is this a great way to create your first scripts, is really a great way to get started learning what autohotkey can do for you.

Check out how to Put Your Keyboard’s Unused Keys to Use (by Turning Them into Awesome Shortcuts)!

And as an added bonus, if you are using voice to text software such as DragonDictate these commands are now available to you via voice by simply saying "press F1" for example…


The next tool they recently posted, is a story about how a fella out on the Internet has used autohotkey to modify the function of the number pad to interface with the Windows Aero snap feature.

For me the Windows Aero snap feature is something I used really quite a lot and with a 16:9 monitors, it's a great way to manage your screen space. For me I would always have what I'm writing on the left and my research/references on the right. This feature was really great for that.

; my first Windows hotkey override
F2:: #Left
F3:: #Right
LAlt:: LWin
 return
However once my hands started to not work so well, I found myself really unable to manage the screen the way I was accustomed. Not having easy access to this snap feature (via pressing the Windows key and the left or right cursor arrow) is in fact what drove me to find autohotkey in the first place… I was looking for a way that I could trigger the snap features via DragonDictate, and autohotkey was letting me do this. In fact, this was some of my first attempts at scripting. For fun I've posted them here:

This was a very, very basic. Nowhere near the level of function you'll see and window pad… But I was very quickly able to use F2 and F3 to stop the window to the left or right of my screen... And it was available to DragonDictate ;-)

Now window pad is considerably more complex to modify, and its default state won't really work with DragonDictate… Because Dragon dictate does not recognize the Windows key... also, I've not really had a chance to play with window pad much yet, but I sure am planning to look into it and figuring out how to change the hotkeys so don't rely on a dual key press is going to be my personal project ;-)

WindowPad Uses Your Number Pad to Snap Windows to the Screen Edge

Both of these scripts are free and well worth the time and effort to check amount… And I feel both of which will likely make your interactions with the computer far smoother. Especially if you have Dragon ;-)

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