I use Remember the Milk to manage my to-do lists. It rocks, and includes great keyboard shortcuts. Two odd ones though (from a Windows perspective) are “r” to rename, and CTRL-SHIFT-slash to “Find.” I want to use F2 to rename, and CTRL-F to find (it’s okay that this would overrides Firefox’s built-in find shortcut, because when I’m on the RTM site, I want to do an RTM find).

Enter AutoHotkey. Here’s a simple script that does a remapping, just for RTM windows:

#IfWinActive Remember The Milk
F2::r
^f::^+/

Love AHK (and RTM).

In the tradition of posting my AutoHotKey hacks (Universal AutoCorrect with AutoHotKey and Wikipedia and Making the INSERT Key Useful Instead of Annoying), here's a new one that lets you easily convert text you select in any application to upper (CTRL-SHIFT-plus) or lower (CTRL-SHIFT-minus) case:

; Convert Selection to Lower Case
^+-::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
StringLower, clipboard, clipboard
Send, ^v
clipboard = %bak%
return

; Convert Selection to Upper Case
^+=::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
StringUpper, clipboard, clipboard
Send, ^v
clipboard = %bak%
return

See either of my previous posts for more detailed information on what AutoHotKey is and how to get it fired up.

If you are the sort of person that uses keyboard shortcut, you probably know that F3 is commonly used as the shortcut for "Find Next". And if you know that, you probably use that command a lot. And you probably still hit F3 in Microsoft Word expecting it to work, only to be disappointed. Despite making that mistake thousands of times.

Or maybe it's just me.

Anyway, here's a quick AutoHotkey script for making F3 work the way you'd expect in Word (it remaps F3 to MS's shortcut for Find Next, SHIFT+F4):

#IfWinActive ahk_class OpusApp ; only in Word
F3::+F4
#IfWinActive ; reset

I could have just remapped the keys in Word itself, but this way I can carry this behavior with me via the AHK scripts I keep on my USB key (and I keep my scripts in sync from my desktop machine to my USB key with Unison, which rocks).

Another quick AutoHotKey script:

#v:: ; Win-V hotkey
clipboard := clipboard
Send, ^v
return

This converts whatever's on the clipboard to plain text (no formatting) and then pastes. I use this all the time when copying some text from a web page to Word because I often don't want the formatting to tag along. I chose Win-V because Ctrl-V is the normal paste shortcut.

Interesting side effect: if you copy a file or folder in Explorer and then use Win-V to paste it, it's path is pasted as text. Also handy.

UPDATE: ruddym contributed this version, which is almost certainly better reliable. Mine hadn't given me any trouble, but his looks more robust, and I've been using it for months. Thanks ruddym!

#v::
Clip0 = %ClipBoardAll%
ClipBoard = %ClipBoard% ; Convert to text
Send ^v ; For best compatibility: SendPlay
Sleep 50 ; Don't change clipboard while it is pasted! (Sleep > 0)
ClipBoard = %Clip0% ; Restore original ClipBoard
VarSetCapacity(Clip0, 0) ; Free memory
Return

Y'know how sometimes you go to hit the Home key and you accidentally catch the Insert key too, but you don't realize it until you've typed over something, because suddenly you are in "overstrike" mode rather than "insert" mode? I wanted to kill the Insert key, and immediately thought of my favorite utility, AutoHotKey (upon which I built that Wikipedia AutoCorrect thing). But instead of just killing the Insert key, I thought perhaps I could make it do something useful. So I took the "append" script from here and just changed it to fire whenever I hit Insert, like so:

Insert::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
clipboard = %bak%`r`n%clipboard%
return

This has two effects:

1. Hitting Insert no longer puts me in "overstrike" mode.
2. If I have text selected, it is appended to the clipboard (unlike CTRL+C, which replaces whatever is on the clipboard with your new selection).

UPDATE: I added another script, this one for CTRL-Insert. As a web programmer, I'm sometimes faced with a specific repetitive task of going through text and putting stuff around little chunks of text. In this case, I had a bunch of questions on a page that needed to be emphasized, so I needed to wrap them in STRONG tags. Each question was different, so I couldn't do a find/replace with regular expressions. What I wanted was to select the question, hit CTRL-Insert, and have it automatically put the tags around whatever I had selected. My solution is kinda convoluted, and nobody will care about it but me, but here goes anyway. First, the script:

^Insert::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
StringReplace, clipboard, bak, @@, %clipboard%
Send, ^v
clipboard = %bak%
return

Then, once you have it installed, the steps:

1. First, type out your "template". You just need to put @@ wherever you want the selected text to be inserted. For my example, the template looks like this:

   <STRONG> @@ <STRONG>

2. Next, select your template text and copy it to the clipboard.
3. You're all set. Select a question (or whatever you want between STRONG tags) and hit CTRL-Insert. Continue selecting and CTRL-Inserting as needed. So in my example, if you select "my dog has fleas" and CTRL-Insert it, it is instantly replaced with

   <STRONG> my dog has fleas <STRONG>

Your IDE might do something like this already, but I like that AHK makes this functionality available in any application. And I can bring it along on my USB key, making me more at home on foreign machines.

[ Be sure to read the final update at the end of this post! ]

I've really been enjoying AutoHotkey (AHK), a tool that lets you execute macros, text expansion, custom keyboard shortcuts, etc. My favorite feature is the text expansion, where it watches what you type and when it recognizes an abbreviation you've defined it will expand it automatically, no matter which application you're typing in. So "ttyl" could be automatically expanded to "talk to you later" in an e-mail, instant message, Word document, browser forms, etc. Very handy.

Anyway, you've probably noticed Word has an "AutoCorrect" feature where it corrects common misspellings on the fly. For example, "teh" gets instantly corrected to "the". I was thinking it would be great to use AHK to get that same functionality in any application. I had slowly been adding my own most common typos to an AHK script, and it worked great, but then I thought it would be nice to have a more comprehensive list. Enter Wikipedia, and its lists of common misspellings! I grabbed the machine-readable download, parsed it, commented out the ambiguous entries (see comments in the script), added in my own person gotchas, and loaded it. Cross-application AutoCorrect! Here's a zip file containing the script if you want to give it a try:

• wikipedia_autocorrect.zip See UPDATE 5 below for the script's new home.

You'll need AHK installed, of course. And note the "Hotstring" feature this technique uses is only available on Windows NT/2000/XP or higher.

UPDATE: Adam at Lifehacker linked this up, thanks! He notes I could have compiled this for non-AHK users. I probably should have, but didn't because I just assumed folks would want to add their own common misspellings. But if you just want to run it without installing AHK, Adam has made a compiled version available via his post. Very cool.

UPDATE 2: I updated this script to include Tara Gibb's enhancement (see below) and a few more of my own common misspellings. The enhancement lets you highlight a misspelling and hit WIN+H to easily add the correction to the script (so it's self-updating). A nice way to flesh the script out with your own spelling foibles (another reason to not run the compiled version provided at Lifehacker, as this feature won't work there).

UPDATE 3: Quite excitingly, Chris Mallett, the author of AutoHotKey, found this script and linked it up! He also made a couple improvements, which are now reflected in the script available above. I tossed in a few more of my personal common misspellings while I was at it.

UPDATE 4: Reader Shane submitted a pile of Word AutoCorrect words for inclusion, so I folded those in (after removing duplicates). Thanks Shane! While I was at it I also folded in a bunch more of my personal misspellings. In all, there's probably around 700 more entries in the latest version.

UPDATE 5: Chris Mallet and the AutoHotKey community have taken this script under their wing. Specifically, Dewi Morgan has made some terrific improvements, cleaned up the code, and added many more words. I think that version should be considered the definitive version, and is available at the AHK Other Downloads page. Very cool!

I've been wanting a tool like AutoHotKey for awhile, particularly for "Hotstrings" (expansion of custom abbreviations in any window!). I just installed the script referenced at the end of the Hotstrings description, and it works great! « via lifehacker »