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AutoHotkey Newsletter August 14th, 2023

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy ,

Like most people that use AutoHotkey, my first uses of it were very simple things like HotStrings and Hotkeys.   I spent several years using AutoHotkey to just utilizing those until I decided to change job roles and moved into Information Technology.

The new job I was hired for  I was tasked to find a way to automate an incredibly mundane task (the job would turn over after ~1 year because it was ridiculously mundane, repetitive, and taxing.)

I began learning things like: Web Scraping, Web service APIs, Regular Expressions, simple GUI creation, Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and much more.  In this video I discuss some of the many cool uses of AutoHotkey.

Why you should learn AutoHotkey! Some most common uses of AutoHotkey

Why you should learn AutoHotkey! Some most common uses of AutoHotkey

It reminded me of this quick clip I saw in a Columbo episode.  Most people, when they first start with AutoHotkey, they are “Imitating a human“.  Probably because it just “makes sense” to us.

Are you using AutoHotkey wrong?
Are you using AutoHotkey wrong?

Most people don’t realized there are API (Application Program Interfaces) that allow them to “programmatically” control programs.  Imitating a human is (often) simple to code however it is not robust and fails a lot and doesn’t transfer to other systems.  You can get a deeper understanding of Human vs. API approach in this video.

APIs compared to Human Interfaces: How do you use AutoHotkey?
APIs compared to Human Interfaces: How do you use AutoHotkey?

In our AHK hero group we’re frequently helping people take their scripts that imitate human behaviors and adapt them to using an API approach.

Now on with the show…

Intro to AutoHotkey HotStrings with AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate Objects GUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Make the switch to v2

Forcing an Expression in AHK v2

During this Automator team meeting Isaias was teaching Irfan and I how we can force an expression in v2.  It’s not “pretty” code, but it’ll ‘getter done’.  LOL

tatm:Forcing an Expression in AHK v2 to get around illegal chacter in JSON
tatm:Forcing an Expression in AHK v2 to get around illegal chacter in JSON

Using built-in AutoHotkey Functions

Unlike other languages, AutoHotkey has a LOT of built in functionality.  This video is an extract from Intro to AHK in v2.   Remember AutoHotkey functions are an AMAZING way to level-up your automation skills!

Using built-in Commands and Built in AHK v2
Using built-in Commands and Built in AHK v2

Me “Helping” AHK hero members 🤣

As many of you know, I’m not a programmer.  In fact, I love the fact that I’ve never gone down that path yet I’ve used AutoHotkey to do AMAZING things!

I’m smart enough to know hire very talented people like Isaias and Irfan to help solve the more complicated AHK Hero member’s problems.  This video a short excerpt from Galaxy Quest but it’s pretty close to how I feel on the Hero calls go.  If you’re not an AHK hero member, I highly recommend you consider joining.  Every week we have 3 hours of calls helping people with their tasks.  And we have a private Telegram group where people can get their problems solved during the week.  And you get 25% off our courses & client work!

Helping AHK Hero members
Helping AHK Hero members

📚 What we’re reading

🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage

⚡️Productivity tips:  Revisit current processes

Humans are horrible at re-thinking a problem.  Once we solve something we rarely re-think how it is being done.

Remember to review processes and look for ways to improve efficiency. Refining your workflows are great ways to save time and be more efficient!

🤣 A spot of Humor:  I forgot I created this page of AutoHotkey Jokes.    I’ve included a few below but be sure to check out the above page for more.

Q: What do you say to an AutoHotkey v1 user who wants to learn object-oriented programming?

A: Good luck with that!

Q: Why did the v1 user refuse to switch to v2?

A: Because they didn’t want to leave their comfort zone… which happened to be a time capsule.

Q: What do you call an AHK v1 script that uses GUIs?

A: A mess.

If you’re not using AHK v2 yet we have a great course to help you make the transition painless!

AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.

They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday calls are geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)

🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

  • Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive and Believe, It Can Achieve. — Napoleon Hill
  • Work harder on yourself than you do on your job — Jim Rohn
  • When experiencing errors with tools, typically you should blame the operator, not the tool. — Joe Glines
  • Today is always the most productive day of your week. — Mark Hunter
  • A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore — Yogi Berra

AHK Newsletter⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue?  Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude.  Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here.  We never share your email with anyone.  Ever!

The-Automator

Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff

P.S. The majority of AutoHotkey users start-off imitating a human but realize it is a lousy approach. Learning programmatic ways to automate software with AutoHotkey will save you time and build much more reliable, sharable, scripts.  We highly recommend you click here and purchase one of our courses and begin the path to victory!

Remember all of our courses come with a 200% money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose!

Why you should learn AutoHotkey

Why you should learn AutoHotkey

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

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.

Transcripts to Why you should learn AutoHotkey

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

AutoHotkey Newsletter 2023-07-17

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Can responsibility help keep you alive?

Yes, it can!

In one classic study conducted by Ellen Langer at Harvard University residents in a nursing home were given a house plant.   Half were asked to look after it while the other half were told that the staff would take look after it.

Six months later only 15% of those asked to take care of the plant had passed whereas 50% of those that where told the staff would be responsible had died.

So having responsibilities can have drastic ramifications on your life expectancy.

I don’t think it is a stretch to say this is not a binary relationship.  Thus the more responsibilities you have, the more reasons you have to keep going.

And since learning AutoHotkey drastically increases your ability to get things done, you are more likely to live a longer life!   😊

Now on with the show…

Intro to AutoHotkey HotStrings with AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate Objects GUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Make the switch to v2

Anniversary sale / 40% off all courses

Perhaps you missed the email the other day but I sent out a link to getting 40% off any of our courses (for the first 16 people).  It’s my 16th wedding anniversary and I wanted to celebrate it by letting people get a solid discount to our courses.  I discussed the email and how to learn more about the courses in this video

AutoHotkey Course / Anniversary Sale- Save 40%
AutoHotkey Course Anniversary Sale- Save 40%

Basics of using a Variable in AutoHotkey V2

I’ve been working on an on-boarding email drip campaign for people that are new to AutoHotkey.  Since we are now recommending v2, I decided to extract this video from our amazing Intro to AutoHotkey in v2 course showing the basics of using a variable with AutoHotkey.  As mentioned above, if you act fast, you should be able to get 40% off on the course!

How to use Variables in AutoHotkey v2 Extract from Intro to AHK in v2
How to use Variables in AutoHotkey v2 Extract from Intro to AHK in v2

Remind yourself all the amazing built-in AutoHotkey variables

If you’re like me, it is easy to forget all of the built-in AutoHotkey variables.  That’s where these scripts come in really handy!  We have an easy v1 or v2 script for listing all the variables, and their current values.  In this video I also show how easy it is to filter the variables based on search criteria!  This is a “must have” script; be sure to grab it!

How to Search and Examining Built-in Variables in AutoHotkey
How to Search and Examining Built-in Variables in AutoHotkey

Using AutoHotkey w/o Installing it

It’s easy to forget that people aren’t aware they don’t, necessarily, have to install AutoHotkey in order to use it.  In this video Isaias and I discuss some other great tips that make it easier to use AutoHotkey when you don’t install it.

Using AutoHotkey without installing it
Using AutoHotkey without installing it

📚 What we’re reading

🤖 AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage

⚡️Productivity tips: F11

In many programs you can easily toggle full screen view by pressing F11

🤣 A spot of Humor: I know what I’m doing this weekend!

AHK Hero 🦸‍♂️

Consider joining the 🦸‍♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.  They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 3 hours a week where we help people with their AHK issues (the Saturday call is geared towards people new to AutoHotkey.)

🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

  • Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln
  • As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another — Proverbs 27:17
  • What you plant now, you will harvest later — Og Mandino
  • You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you — Yogi Berra

AHK Newsletter⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue?  Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude.  Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here.  We never share your email with anyone.  Ever!

The-Automator

Joe, Isaias, Irfan, and staff

P.S. The other day I sent out an email with links to 40% off of our courses (for the next 3 people).  Currently there is still time to save so act now before the discounts are used up!  You can see the offers here.