autohotkey-scripts

Interested in AutoHotKey but don't know where to start? This is a collection of scripts I use every day, annotated with plenty of comments so you can understand how it all works!

Disclaimer: many of these scripts are pretty jank. There's no incentives to clean things up when I'm the only developer and user. Don't feel like your AHK needs to be pristine. Embrace the jank.

How to use

Everything is called from main. If you're completely new to AHK, you can just copy the first 10 lines of main.ahk and then pick some of the hotstrings from Hotstrings.ahk. That's all you need to start making AHK useful!

Otherwise, feel free to download the entire thing, or scavenge just the parts that seem useful to you.

Installing AHK

If you have winget, you can do winget install autohotkey.autohotkey. Otherwise you can download it from the site. Make sure you download v2.0. These scripts won't work in v1!

General Design Notes

~~Almost all~~ Many of the hotkeys are designed to conflict minimally with the systems hotkeys. Some ways of achieving this:

1. All hotstrings start with ;, so that you don't accidentally type them
2. Hotkeys that use just ctrl or alt only activate with the righthand ctrl or alt. So if "rightctrl+1" is a hotkey, "leftctrl+1" will still do whatever it's supposed to.
3. Some hotkeys use win+alt, which I don't think anything else uses.
4. Some hotkeys are keyed to the numpad.

As this is adapted from my personal scripts, which I've steadily developed over time, not all hotkeys follow these rules.

Learning Opportunities

Several of the files showcase different topics in AHK. Among them:

• Input hooks, extensible hotkeys: Folders.ahk
• Window Groups: WindowSwitching.ahk
• Using external programs: Timezone.ahk
• GUIs, reading files: GUI.ahk
• Objects, writing to files: Researcher.ahk

When the same topic (like #HotIf) appears in multiple files, I erred on the side of redundant information.