This article was written a few years ago, before Launchy either existed, or anyone had heard of it. Now, it's less useful, as a lot of the functionality can be accomplished more easily with Launchy. Still, I think the general theme of the article holds true: use AutoHotkey to increase what you can do with the keyboard.

In my never-ceasing quest for computer efficiency, and to minimize my therbligs while working on the computer, I have started to despise using the mouse. Nothing annoys me more than having to move my arm and hand those 12 or so inches from my keyboard to my mouse, and back again. Also, there are lots of fingers and lots of keys on the keyboard, making sequential button presses much faster than sequential mouse clicks. (For example, I can type my name much faster than I can click my name onto an on-screen keyboard.) So, I have found a few tricks that save me lots of time.

Fast application launching

I found this on a website somewhere...I'd love to give credit to the guy that made this up, but I haven't been able to find the site again.

Anyway, the gist of this is to allow you to launch programs (and open directories) really fast. None of this clicking through your start menu business. And it's really easy to have LOTS of apps and directories included with this shortcut, so it ends up being more useful than the windows quicklaunch (even if you COULD use the keyboard to launch things off of it.)

With this new shortcut system, you can launch a huge number of apps by hitting the windows key, the - key, then a 2 letter code for your shortcut. For example, I use "ie" for Internet Explorer, "ex" for excel, "pb" for paintbrush, etc. So to launch paintbrush, I just hit windows, dash, pb, and voila, paintbrush is ready to go. You can also set up directory shortcuts as well. To distinguish between these and regular app shortcuts, I choose to use 2 dashes for directories ("windows, dash, dash, my" for my documents).

How to set it up

Ok, first, you must be using the windows classic style start menu, not the new fancy xp style menu.


Then, create a folder called - in your start menu (right click the start menu, explore, then create a folder named -). Then, for each shortcut you want, create a directory in that - directory, named with the first letter of the shortcut. Then, inside THAT directory, you create a shortcut to the app. Rename the shortcut to have the 2nd letter of the shortcut keys to be the first letter of the shortcut name (For IE, put the shortcut in folder "i" and name the shortcut "e - internet explorer".


There you have it! Now, when you hit the windows key, it pulls up the start menu. Pressing - takes you into your shortcut directory, then you can jump through all the shortcut directories and shorcuts by typing the 2-keystroke code for your app.

Auto Hotkey

After searching all over for good utilities to help me in my quest for keyboard shortcuts, I have come across the program Auto Hotkey, available from http://www.autohotkey.com. It allows you to create all sorts of windows hotkey and application control scripts. I have been using it for a few weeks, and still can't understand the half of what it can do. But nonetheless, it has met my purposes, so I highly recommend it.

If the idea of writing all sorts of hotkeys and scripts and whatnot to control your computer is as exciting to you as it is to me, I suggest you download it and read through the documentation, and tweak it to do what you want.

If not, you can steal my settings. You can download a compiled version, which you can just double click to run without installing AutoHotkey, or you can download the script itself, if you have AutoHotkey and want to edit my settings.

Basically, I have added a bunch of hotkeys to avoid having to move my right hand all over, or even to stretch my right hand to hit backspace and enter (call me lazy if you want, but it's really nice).
Here's my hotkey configuration:

Then, to top it all of, I use another utility to swap my caps lock key and my left windows key, so I use all those shortcuts by holding caps lock (which is in a very convenient location), and use caps lock by hitting the left windows key (not so convenient location). The reason I use another utility is that my computer beeps whenever you hit caps lock, and autohotkey works on a relatively high level, so even if you use it to remap caps lock, I still get that annoying beep whenver I push it. But the utility Keytweak lets you remap keys on a lower level, thus preventing the beeps. (actually, anything keytweak can do you can do through the registry, but it's a whole lot easier with this utility.)

If your computer doesn't have any annoying side effects of hitting the caps-lock key, I recommend just using Autohotkey to swap the caps-lock and left win, if you want to try my shortcuts.

But, most likely, nobody in their right mind would want to try them.