Comment by roryisok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roryisok | Hacker News Reader

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AutoHotKey

https://www.autohotkey.com/

Create scripts to automate all kinds of things, usually triggered by keyboard / mouse conditions.

Here are a few - these are small things, but they can incrementally save hours and hours

- CTRL+@ - pastes my email address at the cursor

- ALT+MouseWheel - Page up / Page down

- ]d - send the current date and time to the cursor

- CAPSLOCK - sets transparency of window to 75 as long as caps is held down

- #t - open http://e.ggtimer.com

It's also set up as a universal spell-correct and intellisense for SQL/ JS / PHP etc independent of IDE

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ShellJump

https://github.com/kjerk/shelljump

Set up jump locations and shortcuts so that you can quickly move between project folders in powershell

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Renamer

http://www.oldware.org/software.php?swid=74

The original authors site isn't available anymore, not sure why because this was a super useful utility. Its like Ant Renamer or File Renamer or any of those, but I just prefer this one's simplicity

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Mp3Tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Bulk edit Id3 tags on mp3 files (if anyone has mp3s anymore)

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NimbleText

http://nimbletext.com/

Simple tool to repeatedly format text. Like foreach for plain text

BetterTouchTool (https://www.boastr.net/) is kinda like an AutoHotKey for OS X -- but on top of custom keyboard shortcuts, it also allows you to configure custom trackpad gestures.

It's easily saved me 100+ hours -- a half-second at a time, 400 times a day. And probably a couple cases of RSI, a couple inches of finger contortion at a time.

The economy of motion is as far beyond keyboard shortcuts as keyboard shortcuts are beyond hunting around with a mouse. It's crime more people don't use it.

For OSX I wound up doing the completely built-in route. > Create Automator Workflow Service > Assign Hotkey to service > service has one item: Run applescript.

I miss the days when applications came with proper applescript dictionaries. Nowadays I have to pull shit like

  tell application "System Events"
      tell process "Firefox"
          get menu item "Quit" of menu "File" of menu bar 1
          click
      end tell
  end tell

I love BetterTouchTool, especially since it allows setting everything on a per application basis. I use it to have the same keyboard shortcuts for navigating tabs in everything, like browsers, iterm, finder, IDEs and more, it's so nice to have consistent shortcuts.

It's also really practical for programs that don't even support custom keybinds or when running multiple instances at the same time like multiple firefox profiles. No need to set the new shortcuts in every profile, they just always work on every running firefox instance.

It also has nice features for window snapping and resizing, I have two of my side mouse buttons mapped to window move and window resize respectively, whenever I hold one of them down the window under the mouse pointer will just move/resize accordingly until I release the mouse button, including snapping to edges and all that nice stuff.

BTT is one of apps I miss most whenever I use windows, makes customizing the user experience so much easier.

And for making keyboard input do things you didn't know were possible, OS X has Karabiner (http://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/). Advanced stuff has a steep learning curve, but the author's really helpful.

TIL that BetterTouchTool can be used to configure keyboard shortcuts.

What are your favorite or most-used shortcuts?

This is a relatively fresh reinstall, and I've only been adding gestures as they come up [0] -- so this should be pretty representative of my top usage (slightly reordered for organization):

https://i.imgur.com/qvAOmHA.png

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I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that 3 Finger Tap (open in new tab), Pinch In/Out (close/open tab), and Rotate Left/Right (change tab) are my most used custom gestures.

With 3 Finger Swipe Left/Right (back/forward) configurable in vanilla system preferences, but done in BTT for consistency, and 4 Finger Swipe Up (Show Desktop)/Down (Mission Control) with their directions reversed from the system defaults [1].

Really, every one of the gestures on there is pretty indispensable to me feeling comfortable using a computer. Going back to keyboard shortcuts for the same actions (eg, when I'm using someone else's computer) feels like hunting-and-clicking menu items with a mouse.

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[0] Import/Export is a thing, but I usually use a reinstall as an opportunity to tighten things up.

[1] Because this way makes way more intuitive sense to me. Swipe Up = Swipe Away = "GTFO windows". What hell, Apple HCI engineers?

I enjoy BTT bunches and use a non-apple keyboard/mouse.

Rebinding the f1-f4 keys to tab navigation (previous, next, close tab, new tab) works well. Rebinding extra mouse buttons to get gestures back on non apple mice (tilting scroll wheel to smart zoom). Other setups would be neat to hear about.

https://anonimag.es/i/BTTb90ed.png

I love the AutoHotKey community. People have created completely crazy things (like a fully featured IDE for AutoHotKey) in something that so obviously is not suited for the task. It's great.

Awesome AutoHotkey list

https://github.com/ahkscript/awesome-AutoHotkey

A curated list of awesome AutoHotkey libraries, library distributions, scripts, tools and resources.

Mp3Tag is a pretty amazing piece of software.

I have a bit of OCD when it comes to micromanaging my music library, and the bulk editing and automation features in Mp3Tag is the the only reason why I ever have time left to do anything else.

Me too! I wince if I find a folder with names in the wrong format, or no album artist

Is there anything like AutoHotkey for Linux?

On Linux it depends on your desktop environment, I suppose.

Or if you just use a window manager, like i3wm for example, you can define all sorts of hotkeys, which you can also bind to custom shell scripts, or anything you like, in your i3 config.

Edit: I used this a while ago, when I was using bspwm as my window manager: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

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