Ableton Issue while trying to control click - autohotkey

Even though I have read the docs and watched tutorials I am a complete beginner so I apologize If its a silly question. I have tried for quite a while to do this with no results.
I want to have NUMPAD0 key to press the global recording button in Ableton Live but I do not want to do it through mouse coordinates (1. Because the windows might be minimized when I need to record and 2. Because I want to implement this in the future in order to be able to press the recording button also on individual tracks as I create them, which might range from 1 to 80 new tracks for example)
The thing is that the Windows class dynamically changes and the Control ID is not shown in winspy.
This is what I have been doing:
GroupAdd, Live, ahk_class
Afx:0000000140000000:0:0000000000000000:0000000000900015:00000000007A04C3
GroupAdd, Live, ahk_class
Afx:0000000140000000:0:0000000000000000:0000000000900015:0000000000200651
GroupAdd, Live, ahk_class
Afx:0000000140000000:0:0000000000000000:0000000000900015:0000000000290651
GroupAdd, Live, ahk_class
Afx:0000000140000000:0:0000000000000000:0000000000900015:00000000001E05F1
curMode := 1
return
Numpad0::
SetControlDelay -1
controlclick, ahk_group Live0,,,,,NA
return
So, my issues are these: 1. In the GroupAdd command I have put the window classes that I have seen yet I believe there might be more classes, that appear everytime I open a new Ableton window. 2. In the Control Click command, I havent put the control ID because I couldnt find it.
Any advice on how to finish this code or change it to a different it in order to press that Record button in Ableton, without using coordinates?
EDIT:
This is the code Im trying now, following suggestions but I havent got any results yet:
SetTitleMatchMode, Regex
SetTitleMatchMode, Slow
#IfWinActive, .*als
Numpad0::F9
#IfWinActive
return
And this is the 2 version of that, which is not working either
SetTitleMatchMode, Regex
SetTitleMatchMode, Slow
#IfWinActive, Afx:0000000140000000
Numpad0::F9
#IfWinActive
return

While I've never used GroupAdd, if there's a finite number of Class permutations, it seems to me you could RegExMatch against those and then form your group inside that. The GroupAdd spec seems to make all parameters optional beyond the GroupName, so perhaps you could skip the Class declaration after confirming you've got the right window.
Example:
WinGetTitle, Title, A
WinGetClass, Class, A
if (RegExMatch(Title, "Ableton Live.*") AND (RegExMatch(Class, "(AbletonClass1|AbletonClass2|AbletonClass3)")))
{
; Do stuff
}

Related

How to start a program if not already started, put on focus if already started?

I would like to make a ahk script to start apps if they are not currently started and maximize them if they are. Is it possible using AHK ?
CapsLock & w::
Run firefox.exe
Return
Something like this but make it so that if I press CapsLock & w and then minimize firefox, pressing CapsLock & w would bring it back maximized / in focus. Any ideas? Thanks!
Sure, this is very easy and doable with AHK.
Here's a very easy and straight forward example
CapsLock & w::
if (WinExist("ahk_exe notepad.exe"))
{
WinActivate, ahk_exe notepad.exe
WinMaximize, ahk_exe notepad.exe
}
else
Run, notepad.exe
return
ahk_exe (docs) is used to refer to windows by their process. It's very convenient.
The code that you are looking for is somewhat similar to the example they give in the docs for WinActivate
So modifying that example for your purpose, and adding conditionals would give you:
CapsLock & w::
if WinExist("ahk_exe firefox.exe")
if WinActive("ahk_exe firefox.exe")
WinMinimize
else
WinActivate
else
Run firefox.exe
Return
Take note that this script will currently only minimize a Firefox window if it is the currently active window. If you need it to minimize a Firefox in the background, the script would potentially be a bit more complex since you could possibly have multiple Firefox windows open, and you would need to provide conditions and logic to handle cases like those. However, if you need this functionality, describe what behavior you would like to occur if this condition occurs, and I can work on it.

WinActivate does not work as expected. Re-activating focus to the starting window

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

AutoHotKey WinActive returns wrong value when changing window focus

In my AutoHotKey script I'm using #IfWinActive to detect if the Roblox window is in focus, and then press the number 1 button whenever left clicking the mouse, like this:
#IfWinActive, Roblox
LButton::
MouseClick, Left
SendInput, {1}
return
#IfWinActive
It works great, except for when I'm clicking out of the Roblox window back to another window. It still fires this code on the first click, resulting in it typing the number 1 into Notepad (or whatever window I switch focus to).
I figured that when I'm clicking on Notepad the focus is still on the Roblox window, which is why the code still fires. So I tried changing the code to this:
#IfWinActive, Roblox
LButton::
Sleep, 100
if WinActive("Roblox")
{
MouseClick, Left
SendInput, {1}
}
return
#IfWinActive
Assuming that by the time the Sleep finished the focus would have shifted to the Notepad window and If WinActive("Roblox") would return false, but it still returns true and types 1 into Notepad.
I also tried using StartTimer and a label, thinking that maybe the Sleep wasn't asynchronous, but that has the same problem as well.
Anybody know how to get around this issue? Thanks in advance!
The main problem in this case is that the hotkey is fired immediately after LButton is pressed down and the Roblox window is still active.
The only solution I see is to fire the hotkey upon release of the LButton using the tilde prefix (~) to prevent AHK from blocking the key-down/up events:
#IfWinActive, Roblox
~LButton Up:: SendInput, 1
#IfWinActive
There are a couple of ways we can achieve this. TL;DR for solution, check the yellow part of this post.
Firstly I'll address the problems in your code:
Usage of MouseClick over Click. Technically nothing wrong, but Click is said to be more reliable in some situations and easier to use. Looks cleaner as well.
Wrapping 1 in {} is not needed and does nothing for you here. In some cases you may even produce unwanted behavior by doing this. In a send command, {} is used to escape keys that have special meaning, or to define keys that you can't just type in. More about this from the documentation.
Having a somewhat of a bad WinTitle that you're matching against. Again, nothing technically wrong, but right now you match any window that starts with the word Roblox. Shouldn't be too hard accidentally match the wrong window.
A quick and a very effective solution would be matching against the process name of your Roblox window.
So #IfWinActive, ahk_exe Roblox.exe or in an if-statement if (WinActive("ahk_exe Roblox.exe")) (assuming that's the process' name, I have no idea)
For an absolutely fool proof way could match against the hwnd of the Roblox window. However, that's maybe a bit overkill and you couldn't really use it with #IfWinActive either. An example I'll write below will use this that though.
However, problems 1 and 2 can be entirely avoided by doing this neat way of remapping a key (remapping is pretty much what you're doing here).
~LButton::1
Ok, so why does that work?
key::key is just the syntax to easily do a basic remap, and with ~ we specify that the hotkey isn't consumed when it fires.
Cool, but now onto the actual problem you're having.
So what went wrong with the sleeping thing? Well since you're consuming the hotkey, all you're actually doing is firing the hotkey, waiting 100ms, then checking if Roblox is active. Well yes, it will still be active since nothing was ever done to switch focus away from it.
If you were to not consume the left clicking action, it would work, but it's definitely not a good idea. You do not want to sleep inside a hotkey statement. AHK does not have true multithreading and unless you would've specified a higher #MaxThreadsPerHotkey for your hotkey, all subsequent presses of the hotkey would be totally ignored for that 100ms.
So yes, with specifying a higher amount of threads that can run for that hotkey, it would kind of make this solution work, but it's still bad practice. We can come up with something better.
With timers you can avoid sleeping in the hotkey statement. Sounds like you tried the timers already, but I can't be sure it went right since code wasn't provided so I'll go over it:
#IfWinActive, ahk_exe Roblox.exe
~LButton::SetTimer, OurTimersCallbackLabel, -100 ;-100 specifies that it runs ONCE after 100ms has passed
#IfWinActive
OurTimersCallbackLabel:
if (WinActive("ahk_exe Roblox.exe"))
SendInput, 1
return
And now onto the real solution, to which #user3419297 seems to have beat me to, just as I'm writing this line of text.
Using the up event of your LButton press as the hotkey.
#IfWinActive, ahk_exe Roblox.exe
~LButton Up::SendInput, 1
#IfWinActive
This way the down event has already switched focus of the window and our hotkey wont even fire.
Note that here we unfortunately can't use the key::key way of remapping I described above.
Bonus:
Here's something that could be used if the up event of our keypress wouldn't be desirable, or somehow the window switching of the active window was delayed.
RobloxHwnd := WinExist("ahk_exe Roblox.exe")
#If, RobloxUnderMouse()
~LButton::1
#If
RobloxUnderMouse()
{
global RobloxHwnd ;specify that we're using the variable defined outside of this function scope
;could've also ran the code to get Roblox's hwnd here every time, but that would be wasteful
MouseGetPos, , , HwndUnderMouse ;we don't need the first two parameters
return RobloxHwnd == HwndUnderMouse ;are they the same hwnd? (return true or false)
}
Here we're first storing the hwnd of our Roblox to the variable RobloxHwnd.
Note that Roblox would need to be running before we run this script, and if you restart robox, script would need to be restarted as well.
So adding some way of updating the value of this variable on the fly would be good, maybe under some hotkey.
Then by using #If we're evaluating an expression (in our case, running a function and evaluating its return value) every time we're about to attempt to fire the hotkey. If the expression evaluates to true, we fire the hotkey.
Usage of #If is actually not recommended, and it is good practice to avoid using if at all possible. However, you wont encounter any problems in a script this small, so using #If is going to be very convenient here.
If you were to have a bigger script in which there's a lot of code running often, you'd be likely to run into problems.

Autohotkey autocomplete limit to certain windows

I am trying to use the Autohotkey autocomplete script here: http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/60998-autocomplete-updated-26713/ but limit it to certain windows. Enclosing the entire script within #IfWinActive does not seem to work. I really like this completion script but would not want it showing up all over the place. Is there a way to limit the autocompletion to specific windows?
A quick study of the source code showed that every keypress results in a call of the Suggest subroutine. This seems to be a good place to check for the active window. I've implemented a minimal change in the source, you can check it out here.
First, you have to define which windows you want to exlude from the functionality, I achieved this by defining a window group:
GroupAdd, excludedWins, ahk_class CabinetWClass ; windows explorer
GroupAdd, excludedWins, ahk_class DV2ControlHost ; start menu search bar
GroupAdd, excludedWins, ahk_class ConsoleWindowClass ; console
Please note that I'm using Windows 7; maybe, the windows have other identifiers in other versions.
Second, you need to tell the Suggest subroutine to ignore these windows:
Suggest:
IfWinActive, ahk_group excludedWins
{
return
}
It seems to work, but I only tested very superficially and didn't investigate the source code dependencies. Let me know how it works for you.

ahk controlclick pokerstars waiting list

I am writing a script that will automatically click on the Waiting List button on the pokerstars lobby. I tried Click x,y and it works, but the problem with this is that if the focus switched from lobby to table, the raise/call button is clicked--DISASTER.
Looking for solutions, I found that ControlClick can do the job for me, but I can't get the script to work. I read about the parameters needed for ControlClick to work, and using different combinations of the paramters that I found using WindowSpy, I can't get the script to work.
Here are some of the lines I have already tried--
a::
SetControlDelay -1
ControlClick PokerStarsButtonClass34, PokerStars Lobby, Waiting List
return
a::
SetControlDelay -1
ControlClick x900 y65, Pokerstars Lobby, Waiting List
return
can you help me fix this--thanks
First, I would try omitting the WinText parameter of your ControlClick calls (that means removing the trailing ", Waiting List") because I'm not sure if the Stars Lobby actually has that text as part of its text visible via the window spy. The WinTitle should be enough.
If you search the AHK forums, you will find that there are many threads of people complaining that ControlClick is not properly sending clicks to buttons or windows. So your problem is not unique.
Now, afaik ControlClick is just a wrapper for sending WM_LBUTTONDOWN messages. But, in some cases, sending the messages directly actually does work, when ControlClick fails. In fact, this function is commonly used in AHK scripts designed for Pokerstars.
PostLeftClick(x, y, hwnd) {
PostMessage, 0x201, 0x0001, ((y<<16)^x), , ahk_id%hwnd% ;WM_LBUTTONDOWN=0x201
PostMessage, 0x202 , 0, ((y<<16)^x), , ahk_id%hwnd% ;WM_LBUTTONUP=0x202
}
So you can try the above function and see if it works. You'll need to get the handle of the lobby first, with something like lobbyhwnd := WinExist("Pokerstars Lobby") and then pass lobbyhwnd as the third param to the above function.
If it doesn't work, I would suggest just using Click normally, but explicitly activating the lobby before sending the click, that way you can be certain that the click gets sent to the correct window. For example:
a::
WinActivate, Pokerstars Lobby
Click x900, y65
return