If you've got mundane, repetitive tasks to perform-and who doesn't AutoHotkeywilllet you do them using any keyboard shortcut of your choice. It lets you record keyboard and mouse activity and repeats it as many times as you'd like-much like macros in Word or Excel. It uses its own scripting language, and once you master it, you can create your own mini-applications that'll do anything you want them to-from replacing a string of characters with a phrase to looking up a highlighted word in the dictionary.

You don't really need to learn AutoHotkey's scripting language to get started-it comes bundled with AutoScriptWriter, which records the macros for you. One of the first things we do immediately after installing AutoHotkey is to assign Windows key shortcuts to our favourite applications-{ Windows] + [0] becomes Opera, [Windows] + [Q] becomes Quake 3 and so on. Other such simple tasks follow, but to really tap AutoHotkey's capabili¬ties, you'll need to learn the language-which, fortunately, is fairly easy to learn. You'll find a detailed tutorial here: /docs/Scripts.htm.

Hotkeyer's Tip

If you're working on multiple PCs and want to take your scripts with you, you can compile them to make each script a standalone EXE¬just right-dick on a script and choose Compile Script! Once you've done this, you can run this EXE on any PC, so your shortcut or text replace¬ment scripts can travel with you. They reside in the system tray, and ending them is as easy as right-elick> Exit.

The Alternative

You can get your Windows key shortcuts with WinKey. but there's really no alternative to AutoHotkey that even comes close to what it offers.