AutoHotkey (AHK) is a free, open-source macro-creation and automation software for Windows that allows users to automate repetitive tasks. It is driven by a scripting language that was initially aimed at providing keyboard shortcuts, otherwise known as hotkeys, that over time evolved into a full-fledged scripting language.
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well I’ve been selling my soul working all day over time hours for pay so I can sit out here and waste my life away drag back home and down my troubles away it’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to for people like me people like you wish I could just wake up and not be true but it is all it is living in the New World [Music] song these rich men North the Richmond Lord knows it all to one I have total control wanna know what you think wanna know what you do and they don’t think you know but I know that you do cause your
dollar ain’t and it’s taxable [Music] I wish politicians look out for minors and not just minors on an island somewhere Lord we got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat and the whole Beast milking welfare but God if you’re five foot three and you’re 300 pounds taxes don’t not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down lord it’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to for people like me people like
you wish I could just wake up and not be true but it is all it is [Music] these rich men know the Richmond Lord knows they all just wanna have total control wanna know what you think wanna know what you do and then I don’t think you know but I know that you do cause your dollar ain’t and it’s taxed in no hand calls her rich men north of Richmond [Music] thank you [Music] I’ve been selling my soul working all day over time hours
The key idea of the video is that hot strings in AutoHotkey are a simple and useful way to save time and standardize text input by creating text expansions triggered by small triggers.
00:00 🔥 Learn how to create hotstrings in AutoHotkey, a simple and useful way to save time and standardize text input.
00:51 💡 The course offers a double your money back guarantee within the first 30 days if you don’t find it valuable, encouraging you to work smarter, not harder.
01:26 🔥 A hotString is a text expansion where a small trigger expands to a larger piece of text, and this video demonstrates two ways to create hotstrings.
02:14 📝 Use a trigger, such as “ta”, followed by “::”, then type the desired expansion (e.g., a website URL), and use an ending character (e.g., tab, space, enter, or dot) to execute the expansion.
03:43 💡 HotStrings in AHK v2 allow for quick expansion of frequently used text, such as usernames and program names, saving time on typing and fixing typos, and there are options available to remove unwanted ending characters.
04:23 📝 HotStrings in AHK v2 allow for the insertion of specific text, such as adding a tab between words, which can be useful for filling out forms or entering passwords.
06:01 💡 The speaker discusses the use of special characters in hotkeys and the need to be careful with them to avoid unintended actions.
07:40 📝 To create dynamic hot strings in AHK v2, use the hot strings function and pass the hot string itself, followed by the text to be expanded, with the option to execute the creation of the hot string.
To create dynamic hot strings in AHK v2, use the hot strings function and pass the hot string itself, followed by the text to be expanded.
The function creates a hot string if the option is set to true, otherwise it does not execute the creation of the hot string.
Transcripts to How to Create a HotString in AutoHotkey
hey this is Joe Glines from the-Automator and in this video we’re going to have Isaias show you how to create HotStrings think of as like text expansion right you type something small and then bam you have the text that you want in Autohotkey they’re very simple to use it was the first AutoHotkey course that I ever did because they’re the hidden gems of AutoHotkey they’re so useful we should be using them all the timethis video is actually an extract from our intro to Intro to AutoHotkey in V2 course I’m
going to put a link up here if you’re interested in buying it we’ll give you 20 off if you click this link check it out it’s around four hours long this video most of the videos are three to five minutes long I think this one’s a little bit longer than that but HotStrings are a phenomenal way to save time and to standardize the text that you’re putting in somewhere you know when you have it or it’s repeated so I use them a lot I have hundreds and hundreds upon them sogive it a try
if you’re interested take a look at the course as I said thethe courses by the way come with a double your money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose is if you pay let’s say fifty dollars for the course we would pay you a hundred dollars if you said no I I didn’t think it was good quality right so within the first 30 days you’re eligible for a double your money back guarantee because our courses are really well put together and we have a lot of faith that you will see that value and
you’re going to start working smarter not harder so check it out I hope you enjoy it cheers one of the most interesting things that you can do without a HotStrings now what they are is that you just create a small trigger a few letters or a word that once you type it gets expanded to a bigger piece of text they’re so easy to create that is insane once you learn about this it’s going to be so you’re going to create so many of them very likely so let me show you in
this video I’m going to show you two ways of creating HotStrings and then I will talk about some options let’s go ahead and open a blank script in which I have already my directive setup and let’s go ahead and show you how to create a hot screen first of all you just go ahead and use the colon twice to indicate that whatever comes next is a trigger in this case let’s go ahead and use ta as trigger slash ta and whenever I type slash ta I want it to show a website for
com and that is going to be my expansion so let’s go ahead and run that and let’s open a new file and type slash T8 now triggers don’t execute Automatically you have to use what is called an ending character usually by hitting tab space enter or a DOT for example it tells ourHotkey it just
goes ahead and shows your expansion which is great because a lot of times like my usernames most of the time websites that I visit very often a lot of program names that have some parameters all of that I just have them on HotStrings so that I don’t have to spend too much time fixing type typos or something like that right but let’s go ahead and take a look at how to createsome things that you have to keep in mind when you create these guys the ending characters might not be something that you want all the time so
in the other section I’m going to give you there’s a section in which I’m going to talk about some options that you can set to remove those things but before I get into that let me explain here on the right side is not simply literal text there are some things that get translated and let’s go ahead and take a look at that for example let’s say hello world now let’s say that I want to use the word hello here but the World Part I want to put it after a tab I could go ahead and open curly braces here use the
word Tab and close the curly braces and then world so instead of having hello world just with the space in between I want to have a tab in between so let’s save this up rerun it and if I use HW you will notice that I have Hello on one side at a tab in there and World on the other so this is something that it is amazingly useful in many cases I usually use this to fill out some username and password for example because I put my username in one side hit Tab and then my password or which the only thing that I wouldn’t
recommend about that I just do that on accounts that I don’t care about the password because you don’t want to save your passwords in a text file so but if it is an account that I have over there that have a lot of passwords that I don’t really care about then having these fill that out for me perfect you could use many Auto Keys like the enter key and some others in The Help file you can find the least of all the keywords that you can use for keyboard keys but not only that in ourHotkey there’s
three or Auto modifiers like the old the shift and control keys or the window Keys as well that have special characters that trigger them so just to illustrate these we will talk about those characters later on in that but just to illustrate what happens if you’re not careful with this is that the exclamation point is translated to an old key innerHotkey and you have to be careful because
if you put a letter right next to it it would try to trigger some actions like alt a might do something if it is a HotStrings this is what I’m just showing at the moment
that’s the function that we’re going to be using we open a parenthesis and close it again that’s my function and in there I have certain parameters that I can pass the first parameter that I’m going to pass is the HotStrings and in this case I want to use the word new and then a coma and then the text that I want to expand it to this is a new Strength right there
condition these guys are not so these are the two ways of creating HotStrings and also how to deal with this translation and the ending characters which means we’re going to talk a little bit about options
How to create a Hotkey: Intro to AHK in v2 Extract
This video teaches viewers how to create hotkeys in AutoHotkey v2 for launching actions and performing various tasks.
00:00 📝 Learn how to create hotkeys in AutoHotkey, which are triggers used to launch actions, in this extract from the Intro to AHK v2 Hotkeys course.
00:49 📝 Creating hotkeys in AHK v2 is as easy as creating hot strings, with the only difference being the syntax for specifying the hotkey and the action, and modifier keys like Control, Alt, Shift, and Windows can be referred to using special characters.
02:09 💡 To create a hotkey in AHK v2, use the character for the modifier key (e.g., control) followed by the desired key (e.g., enter) and separate them with a colon.
03:03 📝 The speaker explains the difference between hotkeys and hot strings, and demonstrates how to create a hotkey that opens a website when a specific key combination is pressed.
04:08 💡 The Run command in AHK v2 allows the user to execute files or open websites with their default application, making it convenient and efficient.
05:12 🔑 You can easily create hotkeys for various actions like opening files, folders, or websites using AHK v2, with the hotkey command taking a hotkey as the first parameter and the corresponding action on the right side.
05:58 💡 The speaker explains how to define and use a function in AHK v2 for performing actions based on a specific hotkey.
06:50 💡 Create dynamic hotkeys in AutoHotkey by defining a variable and using an if statement to determine if the hotkey should be set or not.
hey it’s Joe Glines from the-Automator and this video we’re going to show you it’s an extract from our Intro to Autohotkey course intro and V2 that is and this is going to walk you through how to create HotStrings and Hotkeys right phenomenally helpful you can use them to launch things you can do using them for a lot of different stuff they’re think of them as triggers when you want to do
something is the most often used so in this video here is this is going to walk you through how to set them up I’m going to put up a coupon code or a link that’ll give you 20 percent off if you’re interested in getting the intro to AutoHotkey course it’s a great solid course I think it’s around four hours long most of videos are between three to five minutes this one’s a little bit longer butthey’re very very to the point and easy to follow they’re built for people who don’t know anything about
coding so check it out I hope you liked it please like the video If this helps you because it really helps us out cheers creating HotStrings so again anAuto Hotkey it is just a matter of specifying the Hotkey that you want and the action the only thing that changes a little bit is the syntax of how you do that let me go ahead and show you how to create static and dynamicHotkeys so if we open a new file we have our directives here for single instance and what it requires and in this case let’s
or Ctrl shift enter I don’t have to write control or you know shift I don’t have to write any of that I just use the character that is designed for it and that’s the reason why on the Hotkeys because you because each each of them has a specific meaning but now to create a Hotkey let’s go ahead and say that I want to show a message box when I hit control enter so what I would do is I would have
to use the character for control which is the correct and then enter as a word like that and then I put two columns one after the Auto which defines that I’m doing a HotString instead of aHotkey here I don’t have the two columns at the beginning but I do have the two columns to divide the action in this case let’s go ahead
and do message box right and this is a test so now when I run this script whenever I hit Ctrl enter on my keyboard I will get this new box this is great as I mentioned it’s really easy and even though this example is very simple you could do many Auto things and actually very cool things for example just to show you how easy it is instead of a message box let’s do something a little bit more practical let’s say that I want to have a website show up whenever I press aHotkey so let’s go ahead and do control okay shift
website here I run this up and again as I mentioned this is Ctrl shift plus F1 in this case and this is Control Plus enter right so I’m running my script Ctrl shift F1 just goes ahead and open scrum with that page so just imagine how cool it is that you can create HotStrings and is
the same concept with the Hotkey command instead so this command takes a Hotkey as the first parameter notice that I’m actually putting quotation marks because this is literal text so this would be control so let’s say Ctrl shift enter in this case and then the action goes on the right side but the second side the the action that I’m going to perform is usually a function that you’re going to call and for that reason I do not have to put that in quotation marks because it is a function object and not only that I have
to Define define the function myself so let’s say open desktop this is going to be my function I just name it like that but as that is not literal text this is referring to a function you do not have to put quotation marks there but you do have to define the function somewhere else we will talk about functions later during the course but as a quick overview this function will take one parameter it is the plot key that I press this up and in the braces here I’m going to put the actions that I want to perform with this function in this case
what I want to do is run the desktop so a desktop is a variable that contains the path to my desktop and if I try to run a folder what is going to happen is that AutoHotkey is just going to go ahead and open the folder in Explorer so in this case this is the way to define a dynamic Hotkey which you can of cAutose use option right if you have a variable called option you can determine if it is true or false and if it is true then go ahead and use theHotkey and set theHotkey if it is false don’t set it so this is the way
In this below video I walk through some of the most common uses of AutoHotkey. AutoHotkey is an amazing and robust language. I’ve been working with it for ~14 years now and I’m still coming up new ways to automate my work! Below are some of the most common uses of AutoHotkey.
Why you should learn AutoHotkey! Some most common uses of AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is a powerful tool for automating tasks in Windows, allowing users to customize key combinations, interact with programs, manipulate files, and connect to web service APIs, ultimately saving time and effort.
00:00 💡 AutoHotkey is a powerful tool for automating tasks in Windows, allowing you to interact with the Windows API and perform a wide range of actions.
00:50 💡 Hotkeys are a simple tool for remapping keys and automating tasks, allowing users to customize key combinations and launch programs with ease.
01:12 💡 AutoHotkey allows you to automate tasks such as file manipulation, copying, and interacting with the clipboard, saving you time and effort.
01:56 💡 AutoHotkey allows you to automate tasks in Windows-based programs, such as Microsoft Office, by connecting to controls and performing actions like clicking, checking, and sending text.
02:48 🤖 AutoHotkey can connect to and automate a wide range of programs with different interfaces, allowing for programmatically controlling them instead of relying solely on mouse clicks and keystrokes.
03:31 💡 AutoHotkey can automate tasks like setting, checking, updating, and removing items from the Windows registry, as well as perform text manipulation and powerful regular expressions.
04:14 🤖 Web service APIs allow you to connect to online servers, send and retrieve data, and automate processes much faster than using a GUI.
04:53 💡 AutoHotkey is a powerful tool for creating GUIs and automating tasks, and the author of AutoHotkey Studio is excited to teach others how to use it effectively.
so why should you care about learning how to use AutoHotkey do the question should be more like what can it do in in Windows now it’s only a windows-based program and for the most part also by the way it runs in Windows 10 eight seven I still have an XP machine I can fire it up and run stuff on that so it can automate a lot of different versions of Windows in so many things in Windows I put together a list here to talk through real quickly it does even more right it’s just I consider it the Swiss army
of Swiss Army knife for Windows it’s an amazing tool for doing stuff with Windows so there’s first off just connecting the windows API an API is an application programming interface alright that’s the way you can programmatically interact with Windows in many of its gooeys and controls and actually pull information out of windows i’m just depending on what you’re doing it’s an amazing amount of stuff you can do with it Hotkeys so if you don’t
like the key combo that you have to hit in your certain program you can remap it or you can automate having it where I hit a couple keys and it will launch a program for me or there’s many things you can do with them hot streams or Texas pinch is another great one where I can type a couple letters and bam it expands into paragraphs if I want you know whenever you want file and folder manipulation so there is a ton of stuff that you can do even one is just editing files like text files and stuff or creating your own files but also moving
files around and backing them up for you automatically copying things writing little programs to to do these things for you can save an awful lot of time accessing the clipboard there’s a lot of stuff no I there’s more advanced ways to do this but it’s often you can just send to copy whatever is highlighted do stuff to it and then send it into a different program right so you can top it into the clipboard it’s an easy way to pull it in if you can’t keep programmatically interact with it and then manipulate
however you want the stuff in the clipboard and then push it back out to one other other program you want it to do you can connect to a lot of Windows based program is using calm that’s this Microsoft’s component object model so things like Excel and outlook and PowerPoint in word you can automate programmatically it’s very somebody using VBA and the code is actually very similar to it but you can programmatically do your automation in it and it’s one of my favorite things to do because in in
corporate world right there were so many things that used Microsoft’s Office programs and you can automate a ton of that stuff you can also connect to controls like like a radio checkbox you know those kind of things you can automate that or just gooeys and you can automate clicking those things or getting’s checking if they are clicked or not clicked see it’s setting their value settings sending text to an edit field you can automate a lot of that stuff there’s these things called the post and send messages a lot of
programs and C programs were to you know have all been developed by different people over you know 30 years and they have different interfaces AutoHotkey kestrokes which if all else fails you can default to that one so there’s that the the automating menu so older ones like notepad have that menu at the top right that’s kind of like
this but these are a little different this is a different ribbon this is doable in AutoHotkey but it’s pretty advanced it’s so far we don’t have a good library for it yet but it’s you know I’m sure it’ll be comingthen the Windows registry if you wanted to constantly set your your registry or check it or update it or you know remove something from it you can automate that with AutoHotkey text manipulation as I mentioned earlier you can go in and read the file look for certain text delete
certain things or you can do regular expressions which are super powerful I’m gonna do an advanced cAutose at some point on regular expressions without aHotkey because it’s such a great tool I have a lot of the-Automator comm you can see examples of especially that the regex stuff i’ve got a full page on that there’s a lot of stuff on using comm then connecting a web service that’s another one i have on my site to but you
can there’s over I’d say over 20,000 open api is out there they’re called web service API s and these are online that you connect you and you do HTTP request to them generally speaking and you can send and retrieve data from these online servers in it’s a great way to interact a lot of you’re using tools that your vendors have they have APIS an don’t even know they exist and it’s so much faster than using like a browser to click buttons and do stuff you can automate that process and that’s the
time you take to do that stuff is nothing compared to what it takes if using a GUI so it’s a great way to do it I mean you can also create amazing gooeys in AutoHotkey a lot of you probably watch my channel and you’ll see Maestri is the author of AutoHotkey studio which is written in AutoHotkey right the whole editor is built in AutoHotkey for AutoHotkey and it’s what we’ll be using in this course but it AutoHotkey can create some really good powerful GUI and it’s pretty simple to create them compared to other languages
so I hope that gets you interested and excited I get really excited when I start doing the stuff and this is why I’m quitting this courses I love teaching people how to automate stuff and I just want you guys to soak it up and automate your worlds away all right Cheers
