Win + mouse wheel keeps showing/hiding start menu - autohotkey

I wanted to add volume control to my mouse with the following scripts
#WheelUp::
Send {Volume_Up}
Return
#WheelDown::
Send {Volume_Down}
Return
However, when I use it, the start menu keeps appearing/disappearing. Is there anyway to consistently suppress the windows key with this script?

I tried to recreate your problem, but the code works on my machine. If I hold the Windows key down and use the mousewheel it adjusts the volume (Windows 10). You might be having problems with a competing command that you are running at the same time.
Also, the line breaks and return statements are unnecessary. It also works as:
#WheelUp::Send {Volume_Up}
#WheelDown::Send {Volume_Down}

Function SoundSet, apparently doesn't cause this issue:
#WheelUp::
SoundSet, +2
Return
#WheelDown::
SoundSet, -2
Return

Related

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. Hold two buttons and tap another to increase volume

I got stuck building an ahk shortcut script to increase / decrease Volume. The idea was to hold down LAlt+LShift and tap F12 to increase one step per tap.
The order in which LAlt and LShift are pressed shouldn't matter.
I came up with this so far:
!+::
While (GetKeyState("LShift","P")) and (GetKeyState("LAlt","P"))
{
F12::Send {Volume_Up}
}
Return
But somehow it increases the volume on holding LAlt and taping F12. LShift gets igronred..
What's wrong with that...
This
F12::Send {Volume_Up}
isn't a command, it's a hotkey assignment. You cannot use it within executable context. It is actually the short form for:
F12::
send {volume_up}
return
You wouldn't wanna have a return somewhere in between the lines which should be executed, would you.
As can be read in the documentation, you can only combine two Hotkeys for an action easily, like a & b::msgbox, you pressed a and b. E.g. for a,b AND c, you'd need some workaround like the crossed out, old answer below.
BUT you can add as many modifiers to your hotkey as you want. Modifiers are ! alt, + shift, # win and so on (please have a look # http://ahkscript.org/docs/Hotkeys.htm#Symbols).
So you can simply use
<!+F12::send {volume_up}
-
So, your aim is simply to have volume_up be fired when three Hotkeys are being pressed. You can achieve it like this:
#if getKeyState("LShift", "P")
*<!F12::send {volume_up}
#if
or
*<!F12::
if(getKeyState("LShift","P"))
send {volume_up}
return
For the meaning of * and < and other possible modifiers, see http://ahkscript.org/docs/Hotkeys.htm#Symbols
Your approach wasn't too bad. It would have worked if you had used the Hotkey command instead of an actual hotkey assignment. Still that would have been unneeded work

Send command, isn't something wrong with AutoHotkey?

So I have this game, called AirMech. It doesn't recognize mouse buttons as controls (yet) so I tried to use AutoHotkey to circumvent it until it's implemented.
#IfWinActive, AirMech
XButton1::Send c
Didn't work. So I tried SendGame, SendPlay and everything else, didn't work either. I googled it, and found out that some games don't recognize any Send commands at all.
Before giving up, I just tried a simple mapping:
#IfWinActive, AirMech
XButton1::c
It actually worked.
Is it expected than no Send command works, but the latter does? What if I wanted to trigger other actions ('c' plus a MsgBox, for instance)?
AutoHotkey has the ability to send keystrokes in a variety of different ways (SendRaw / SendInput / SendPlay / SendEvent). I'm not quite sure what approach the simple key::key mapping uses, but it must be one of them. My guess is that one of SendRaw, SendInput, SendPlay, or SendEvent will work the same as key::key.
Also #IfWinActive sometimes doesn't work exactly the way you expect, especially with fullscreen games. So I usually test my AHK scripts without the #IfWinActive to make sure they're working correctly. Once it's working, I introduce the conditional.
UPDATE
From http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Remap.htm:
When a script is launched, each remapping is translated into a pair of
hotkeys. For example, a script containing a::b actually contains the
following two hotkeys instead:
*a::
SetKeyDelay -1 ; If the destination key is a mouse button, SetMouseDelay is used instead.
Send {Blind}{b DownTemp} ; DownTemp is like Down except that other Send commands in the script won't assume "b" should stay down during their Send.
return
*a up::
SetKeyDelay -1 ; See note below for why press-duration is not specified with either of these SetKeyDelays. If the destination key is a mouse button, SetMouseDelay is used instead.
Send {Blind}{b Up}
return
My notes:
I suspect the reason a::b is working but a::Send b is not is because of how a::b breaks button down and button up handlers into two separate mappings. The game's gameloop probably polls the gameplay keys for "keydown" state, which would not be maintained consistently if AHK is synthesizing repeats. Remapping a_down->b_down and a_up->b_up probably makes AHK emulate more accurately the act of holding the key down, which may matter for programs which test for key state in particular ways (GetAsyncKeyState?).
The asterisk in the mapping means "Fire the hotkey even if extra modifiers are being held down."

Hotkey to restart autohotkey script?

Say I have an autohotkey script C:\path\to\my\script running. Is there a way to define a hotkey that re-starts it?
In order to prevent duplicate instances, I normally do not re-launch a script but use the build-in function Reload. I launch this with Ctrl+Win+Alt+R and use Ctrl+Win+Alt+E to edit the main AHK script.
^#!r::Reload
Actually, my script looks like this:
^#!r::
Send, ^s ; To save a changed script
Sleep, 300 ; give it time to save the script
Reload
Return
^!#e::Edit
As a matter of fact, all the way at the top of my script I have this to give me a visual and audio indication that the script was restarted:
#SingleInstance Force
#installKeybdHook
#Persistent
Menu, Tray, Icon , Shell32.dll, 25, 1
TrayTip, AutoHotKey, Started, 1
SoundBeep, 300, 150
Return
Make a hotkey that runs a script, which in this case is the same script and then exit.
somehotkey::
Run, C:\path\to\my\script.ahk
ExitApp
return
I found this to be the safest option of them all, because it takes care that the correct script is reloaded when you have multiple scripts running simultaneously, which was a recurring issue for me. The combination of the following also ensures that only one instance of a script will ever run at a time. The ScriptFullPath variable includes the name of the script.
#SingleInstance Force ;put this at the top of the script
^r::run, %A_ScriptFullPath%

How can I make AutoHotkeys's functions stop working as soon as the .exe is closed?

I'm testing AutoHotkeys as a way to block user's usage of Ctrl, Alt and Windows Key while an application is running. To do this, I compiled the code:
LAlt::return
RAlt::return
LControl::return
RControl::return
RWin::Return
LWin::Return
into an .exe using the compiler that comes with AutoHotkeys.
My problem is that normally when I close the .exe file (either by code using TerminateProcess(,) or manually) the keys are not released immediately. The Windows Key, for example, may take something like 10 seconds to be finely "unlocked" and become able to be used again, and for me this is unacceptable.
So I got two questions:
Is there a way to fix this problem? How can I make the keys to be released as soon as the .exe is closed?
Would there be any improvement if I tryed to get the same functionality by code? Or if I create the hooks by myself I would get the same problem I'm having with AutoHotkeys?
Thanks,
Momergil
AutoHotkey has a built-in command ExitApp for terminating your scripts.
This example makes Esc your termination hotkey:
Esc::ExitApp
It seems like the delay you are experiencing might be related to how long it's taking the process to close.
You could try making the hotkeys conditional with the #If command*
(i.e. they are only blocked when Flag = 1).
Then you can have the script quickly change the context just before ExitApp by using OnExit. The OnExit subroutine is called when the script exits by any means (except when it is killed by something like "End Task"). You can call a subroutine with a hotkey by using the GoSub command.
Flag := 1
OnExit, myExit
Esc::GoSub, myExit
#If Flag
LAlt::return
LCtrl::return
x::return
#If
myExit:
Flag := 0
Exitapp
* The #If command requires Autohotkey_L.
The other option that will be more verbose, but work for AHK basic, is the hotkey command.
Another option is to have AutoHotkey run the target application, and upon application exit, AutoHotkey exits as well. Here's an example with Notepad. When the user closes Notepad, the script gracefully exits.
RunWait, Notepad.exe
ExitApp ; Run after Notepad.exe closes
LAlt::return
RAlt::return
LControl::return
RControl::return
RWin::Return
LWin::Return
I would use winactive to disable these keys. In this example the modyfier keys are disabled for "Evernote". As soon as you switch to another program the keys are restored and when you switch back to Evernote the modifier keys are disabled again.
SetTitleMatchMode, 2 ; Find the string Evernote anywhere in the windows title
#ifWinActive Evernote
LAlt::return
RAlt::return
LControl::return
RControl::return
RWin::Return
LWin::Return
#ifWinActive