Computer Productivity Book 2. Use AutoHotKey to Share your Personal Productivity Scripts: AutoHotKey productivity, #2

By Max Drake

In this book COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY BOOK II, Use AutoHotKey Share your personal productivity scripts, I want to extend those ideas to generalize personal scripts to share with others. This one has a few heavy chapters and 've tried to lighten the intensity of those chapters with some short chapters on other items.

This means the book will seem a bit haphazard. The main thrust of the book is to give practical examples and go into them in some depth, for generalizing scripts and for building GUI's. I also touch upon using mouse actions as I didn't cover this method in the previous book.

As well as the deep dives I also want to highlight other scripts and actions that may be of use for you in building productivity scripts to share with others.  I'm throwing out ideas that I may have covered in previous books but want to give other examples of as well, eg encryption (one reason for this is we will be using t in Book 3)

As in the previous books, there will be script examples for most chapters and the scripts will be downloadable, so you can test run them and then hack them as you see fit.

At the end of the book, there is a link to download the combined script of a lot of the examples in the book combined into a single script, so you have a starting point to develop your own generalized script.

This book follows on from Book 1 :COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY BOOK I,  Use AutoHotKey Create your own personal productivity scripts

There is also another book that I added as a demonstration of some simple AutoHotKey commands:

Book 0. COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY AUTOHOTKEY. Let's Build a Shareable Personal Productivity Script in AutoHotKey

In the previous books I wanted to expose you to some concepts in AutoHotKey that have practical uses for Productivity scripts you can write and develop for yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: max drake
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201153953

Max Drake

Max Drake is a registered New Zealand Architect originally from England & trained as a Draftsperson and travelled and worked as a designer in Europe USA, Asia, Australia & New Zealand. Taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia as an Architecture Lecturer as a NZ Volunteer with VSA. A freelance designer working in Architecture, Building Services & Structures. Worked with the UN in East Timor as UNV and UN staff working on reconstruction & Mission support. VAST Blog on Visual Asset Strategic Tools about BIM, Revit and programming & data capture (https://cr8ive.tk/)

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am standing on the shoulders of Giants.

I wish to thank the people on AutoHotKey Forum who have shared their knowledge & scripts to help others. Specifically, I’d like to mention Maestrith for Workspaces scriptAHK Command picker and Daniel Schroeder /deadlydog for AHK Command Picker.

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book to my elder brother Jeri who passed away recently, and to his widow Sue. May he rest in Peace and I hope she has the fortitude to carry on with running the business that they built together.

I wish her all the best for the future.

My thoughts are with them both.

INTRODUCTION

This book is part of a journey into making life a bit easier, finding and developing simple scripts that take some of the tedium out of modern work life. Looking at automating simple repetitive tasks that usually are irksome and wearing.

I would recommend that you read the previous Book 1:COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY BOOK as the thrust of the book may not make sense.

Also the AutoHotKey environment setup is not discussed in this book, but is discussed in both the previous books, one of them is free on 2 eBook outlets. I cannot say which as the publishing process blocks any mention of publishers, especially if they are competitors links.

This book follows on from Book 1 :COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY BOOK I,  Use AutoHotKey Create your own personal productivity scripts

There is also another book that I added as a demonstration of some simple AutoHotKey commands:

Book 0. COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY AUTOHOTKEY. Let’s Build a Shareable Personal Productivity Script in AutoHotKey

In the previous books I wanted to expose you to some concepts in AutoHotKey that have practical uses for Productivity scripts you can write and develop for yourself.

In this book COMPUTER PRODUCTIVITY BOOK II, Use AutoHotKey Share your personal productivity scripts, I want to extend those ideas to generalize personal scripts to share with others. This one has a few heavy chapters and ‘ve tried to lighten the intensity of those chapters with some short chapters on other items.

This means the book will seem a bit haphazard. The main thrust of the book is to give practical examples and go into them in some depth, for generalizing scripts and for building GUI’s. I also touch upon using mouse actions as I didn’t cover this method in the previous book.

As well as the deep dives I also want to highlight other scripts and actions that may be of use for you in building productivity scripts to share with others. I’m throwing out ideas that I may have covered in previous books but want to give other examples of as well, eg encryption (one reason for this is we will be using t in Book 3)

As in the previous books, there will be script examples for most chapters and the scripts will be downloadable, so you can test run them and then hack them as you see fit.

At the end of the book, there is a link to download the combined script of a lot of the examples in the book combined into a single script, so you have a starting point to develop your own generalized script.

I’ve tried to make the learning method simple by showing the scripts that you can review & you can download directly to test & adapt. This means you can run the original script and see how it works, then slowly tweak it for your own needs.

Notionally, the intention is that at the end of this book we should have a shareable script that we can share when its COMPILED. So users will have to put in their preferred information in support files through one means or another.

Book 3 will be about protecting your script, being able to create a license for it and then create an install/uninstall file to make it easy for users to install on their PC.

I want to also explore ways of using websites as an online shop, a place to download files and as a blog and help site to help manage your program in delivering a service to others.  I think that will be beyond the scope of Book 3 so may end up being a further book that is not specific to AutoHotKey productivity script programing

The 2 previous books have also been made into Video courses currently on Udemy. You may want to check those out. I personally prefer a visual course to a text course, I’m very much a monkey see monkey do sort of person, that is why I created the video courses.

In reflecting on the chapters and topics in this book I realize that they are a little disjointed. It sort of reminds me of my mathematics degree. The first year taught cohesive courses on Algebra and modern mathematics and the topics all inter-related, but the next 2 years were all about exceptions and odd branches of mathematics such as Eigen values, Imaginary numbers, Transcendental numbers and lots of other wonderful topics. More abstract but still very interesting.

So this book is trying to follow on from Book 0 & Book 1, talk about generalizing topics and also to start supporting topics in Book 3.

I do apologize about the lack of flow in the structure of the book, but its trying to bring a lot of disparate ideas together. I’d stopped writing this book a number of times and thought about the lack of flow its content. I cannot resolve it at this time, but I still think its important.

I hope you find it a useful resource for your projects.

Max Drake

Part 1

CHAPTER 1- FROM PERSONAL TO GENERAL-MODIFYING BROWSER SCRIPT FOR FLEXIBILITY

Open Multiple Websites from a file

Download All Main & Support Files for Chapter 1

Personal to General, adapting script from Book 1

I’m going to use the example of opening multiple webpage tabs in my preferred browser.

In Book 1 it was a personal group of webpages, some on news, and some on Covid-19 around the World which I use for my daily diary.

So, straight away we have four things that are specific to my preferences:

The specific hotkey or Hotstring to trigger the script

The specific web browser

The web pages of my choice

The number of web pages that I want to open at one time

The script works, and it is fine for my needs. Someone in the office sees me doing this and say’s, hay, can I do that too? Can you give me the script?

You say yes, but they will have to re-write the script to suit their specific needs, so they have to either:

Get you to re-write the script for them

They’ll need to install AutoHotKey onto their computer and then learn some aspects of AutoHotKey and then modify the script to suit their own purpose.

Then someone else comes along and suddenly you have multiple variances of the same script. All tweaked to other peoples needs.

How about creating one script and just let them add their own preferences? You give them a compiled executable program file with a .INI file where they can add their own preferences.

The script file from Book one is:

; browserNewsTabs.ahk

!3::   ;Alt+3 to run

{ If WinExist (ahk_exe firefox.exe)