I have a situation with 2-5 windows with the same name. I want to set hotkeys for each window so I can press the hotkey and get focus on the specific window the hotkey is assigned to. I'm told I can do this with AutoHotkey but I can't find how it distinguishes windows if they have the same name.
For reference this is a game so I don't think there is any text internally it could search for. Any thoughts?
Using the windows' HWND is pretty much always the solution here.
The easiest implementation would be to "manually" grab the hwnd's for each window:
^1::Window1 := WinActive("A")
^2::Window2 := WinActive("A")
^3::Window3 := WinActive("A")
1::WinActivate, % "ahk_id " Window1
2::WinActivate, % "ahk_id " Window2
3::WinActivate, % "ahk_id " Window3
With this you'd press Ctrl + 1 on the first window to store its HWND, Ctrl + 2 on the second, etc.
And after that you can use the hotkeys 1, 2 and 3 to activate those windows.
This manual approach is of course quite low-tech, but for situations like these, it's probably just what you want.
It can be quite hard to automatically tell apart duplicate windows.
I can't even begin to write some automatic code for you, since I couldn't know what windows you're trying to tell apart and how.
But you'd probably want to start from looping the result from WinGet, , List(docs).
Related
I am having some serious struggles fully grasping the control on activating windows and forcing their focus and foremost position.
In order to debug a larger script I made a separate script to test the use of WinActivate and again I am observing frustrating behaviour as it either all together ignores the title I have defined or is failing in some other way. In the smaller test script I am simply requesting that the window in which the hotkey was triggered be set as active after another action, specifically an input box
Below is the simple code for testing:
F10::
SetTitleMatchMode, 1
DetectHiddenWindows, Off
WinGetTitle, startTitle, A
msgbox % "Start Title = <" . startTitle . ">"
;WinActivate, startTitle
inputbox, mode, Test box, Testing,,260,160
sleep 500
WinActivate, startTitle
Return
This code does not properly activate the starting window. For example I execute the hotkey in an empty notepad window and upon submitting blank into the input box the focus becomes notepad++ on my second monitor. The second time I press the hotkey from within notepad (or another application) notepad does not lose focus. In a third execution I begin from notepad again and after the input box appears I switch the focus to another window. I again submit blank to the inputbox but that new window remains the focus and notepad is not activated or brought to the foremost position.
Can someone please explain to me what is going on with WinActivate?
I was having similar frustration with unexpected results making a windows script host file and I think I must be missing some fundamental detail in windows.
You are trying to activate a window that start with the literal text "startTitle".
You forgot(?) to either enter expression syntax with % or use the legacy way of referring to a variable %startTitle% (please don't use legacy).
Extra stuff:
You shouldn't specify SetTitleMatchMode and DetectHiddenWindows inside your hotkey statement. There is no need (unless there actually is) to set those every time you hit the hotkey. Just specify them at the top of your script once.
Both of them are useless for you though, below I'll show why. Also DetectHiddenWindows is already off by default.
WinGetTitle is not good to use for this. What you actually want to do is get the hwnd of the window you wish by using e.g. WinExist().
And then refer to the window by its hwnd. Much better than working with window titles, and impossible to match the wrong window as well. To refer to a window by its hwnd, you specify ahk_id followed by the hwnd on a WinTitle parameter.
And lastly, the concatenation operator . is redundant. Of course you may prefer to use it, but in case you didn't know, it can just be left out.
Here's your revised code:
F10::
_HWND := WinExist("A")
MsgBox, % "Start hwnd = <" _HWND ">"
InputBox, mode, Test box, Testing,,260,160
Sleep, 500
WinActivate, % "ahk_id " _HWND
Return
I have used Linux and KDE for a long time and my muscle memory wants to switch keyboard layouts by pressing both shift keys simultaneously. Can I use AutoHotKey to implement that on Windows?
I lack two pieces of information:
How do I remap "both shift keys pressed at the same time"? I can use + to capture the pressing of one shift key, but how about both?
How can I send the key combination that Windows uses to switch layouts (Ctrl+Shift in my current setup)? More generally, how can I remap something to a key combination?
Use combo key notation and L/R prefix, see the documentation (or the help file):
LShift & RShift::send {LShift down}{LCtrl down}{LShift up}{LCtrl up}
I wanted to disable native Windows hotkey altogether. The following works well so far, including console windows.
~RShift & ~LShift::
~LShift & ~RShift::
INPUTLANGCHANGE_FORWARD := 0x2
WM_INPUTLANGCHANGEREQUEST := 0x0050
WinGet, windows, List
Loop % windows {
PostMessage WM_INPUTLANGCHANGEREQUEST, INPUTLANGCHANGE_FORWARD, % Lan, , % "ahk_id " windows%A_Index%
}
return
My problem :
^space & c::
send {F2}
send {Escape}
but it didn't work, how do I emulate Ctrl+Space + AlphabeticaklKey ?
As my previous speakers said, it can't be done easily. Here's my suggestion, it seems to work fine:
^space::
Loop {
if(GetKeyState("c")) {
break
}
if(!GetKeyState("CTRL") || !GetKeyState("SPACE")) {
return
}
Sleep, 50
}
msgbox, You have pressed CTRL+SPACE+C
return
The code is pretty self-explanatory. When CTRL + SPACE is pressed, it waits until either one of both is released or C is pressed. The latter triggers the actual functionality, otherwise it will return.
I actually don't like it very much, because theoretically it may fail in some cases (e.g. when CTRL + SPACE + C is pressed and released before the execution reaches the check for the state of C; although that seems very unlikely).
Update
There's also a way using #If. I recommend using that since it's more sophisticated and reliable. This is due to the fact that it doesn't need any loops:
#If GetKeyState("SPACE")
^c::Msgbox, You have pressed CTRL+SPACE+C
#If GetKeyState("c")
^space::Msgbox, You have pressed CTRL+SPACE+C
As far as I know, you can only combine two non-hotkey keys with the syntax:
space & c:: msgbox space and c
You can read it here
You can define a custom combination of two keys (except joystick
buttons) by using & between them. In the below example, you would hold
down Numpad0 then press the second key to trigger the hotkey:
Numpad0 & Numpad1::MsgBox You pressed Numpad1 while holding down
Numpad0. Numpad0 & Numpad2::Run Notepad
Trying to use control as well like in: space & c & control or space & ^c or any other combination will result in compile error.
My recommendation is that you don't combine that three keys together. Look for a pure hotkey combination or use another more or less useless key.
#!c:: windows + alt + c
AppsKey & c::
Remember that if you use a normal key as modificator, you have to remap it to itself to keep the original functionality, for example with the menu key (appskey):
AppsKey:: Send {Appskey}
AppsKey & c:: ;do what you want
There are actually a couple ways to get help. First of all the authors of this language have moved to a new domain ahkscript.org. It is always welcome to ask questions like these in our forum. I just happened to be digging through this site today and saw this by accident.
When you have more than one line of code after a hotkey you need to have a return follow it:
^space & c::
send {F2}
send {Escape}
return
Hope that helps
I have written a python script for my co-workers, and then created an autohotkey script to run it every time someone presses Ctrl+LShift+Y. Looks something like this:
^+y::Run helper.py
The python script is fine, but the ahk script doesn't work on all the computers. Sometimes it works fine, and sometimes you get this error:
^+y does not exist in current keyboard layout
Now, searching the web this seems to be a problem with multi-language keyboards (we're using both Hebrew and English), because different languages means a different layouts (I guess?). I also found someone explaining that to solve this you need to use scan codes instead of the usual ^ and + and so on (I'd link to it but I cannot seem to find it now).
This all vaguely makes sense to me on a theoretical level, but when I want to realize it with actual code, I don't really know what to do. To me it seems as if this topic is hardly discussed (with the few exceptions being lacking in examples or hard to understand), so I'd love an answer that would include the following:
some simple way of determining the scan code for a key. This should preferably be a pythonic solution (and just out of curiosity, I'd love to know how to do this with linux as well). This is probably the easier part (but I think is an inherent part of a complete answer).
This is the important part: examples of how you implement that scan code in an autohotkey script, including edge-cases (if there are any).
Question 1
As you want to use the key with autohotkey, it makes sense to use autohotkey detect the key in the first place. Obviously this method works only on windows where autohotkey is running.
Write a Autohotkey script with this line and run it.
#InstallKeybdHook
Press the key you want to examine.
Open the script menu by right clicking the icon of the script in the right lower corner of your screen.
Select OPEN, then from the Menu "View / Key history and script info"
There is a line for each keypress.
First column is the VK (Virtual key) code, next is the scancode.
For example for CAPSLOCK the VK is 14 and the Scancode 03a
Question 2:
#InstallKeybdHook
VK14::
msgbox, you pressed capslock!
return
OR
#InstallKeybdHook
SC03a::
msgbox, you pressed capslock!
return
both work.
Note that you can combine two keys into a hotkey by combining them with & (but not 3)
#InstallKeybdHook
RShift & SC03a::
msgbox, you pressed Rshift capslock!
return
You can modify a Scancode with + and ^
#InstallKeybdHook
^+SC02C::
msgbox, you pressed Ctrl Shift and Y(maybe)!
return
Further info about this is on the page "List of Keys, Mouse Buttons, and Joystick Controls" of the autohotkey help file that comes with the default installation.
I'm trying to add custom keyboard commands to an application using Autohotkey.
In many of these hotkeys I would like to use the alt key in combination with some other key of my choice (any of the standard letters).
All works fine as long as I don't restrict their usage in such a manner that they work in the target application only (via the #IfWinActive directive ). If I do so, the hotkeys themselves still work, however their behavior is very strange.
I found that they get activated either if
a) I hold down the alt key and then press the second key (in my case the 'b' key) twice
or
b) I use this hotkey two times consecutively with a very short delay between the two triggerings
- The above two cases might actually be 1 case. I'm not sure...
I have no problems when doing the same with Shift or CTRL.
The 'b' key is not what's causing the problem - no alt + 'letter' combination works.
I have tried all SendModes, but so far with no effect.
Code sample:
#IfWinActive, MyAppTitle ahk_class MyAppClass
!b::
click 367, 86
return
Alt+letter commands in AutoHotkey such as !b work without issue. It's possible the version at the time of this post contained certain bugs or was out of date from the current version.
For your code, it could be done like so:
!b::
WinGetTitle, Title, A
if (RegExMatch(Title, "MyAppTitle"))
{
MouseClick, left, 367, 86
}
return