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Remap and Set Global Hotkeys on Windows 10 with Auto Hotkey

Nick Janetakis on April 22, 2019

This article was originally posted on March 12th 2019 at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/remap-and-set-global-hotkeys-on-windows-10-with-auto-hotke...
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Juan F Gonzalez •

Great post Nick! I've read several of your articles for sorting out my dev configs when I was given a Windows PC and still wanted to develop with the Linux stuff I'm used to. I'm not sure I'll do this hotkeys thing but I'll give it a go just as I did with tmux and vim (and ended up loving them).

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Nick Janetakis • • Edited

Thanks.

The hotkeys are nice for saving time. Your frequently used apps and files / folders can all be 1 key press away.

I just set up a fun one yesterday (not covered in this article). I set up a hotkey to open a specific CSV file that I open on the first of every month to pay out affiliates for the previous month.

But I programmed the hotkey to open last month's CSV file, so it involved dynamically calculating the date and adjusting it by -1 month since I namespace my CSV files by a dated folder.

That looked like this:

#a::
thisMonth := A_YYYY
thisMonth += -1, D
FormatTime lastMonth, %thisMonth%, yyyy-MM
Run, scalc.exe D:\src\scripts\affiliates\%lastMonth%\payouts.csv
return
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It's so much faster to hit Win + a instead of navigating to that affiliates directory manually to open the CSV file.

Or... here's another one since I wrote this article last month. This one gets the hex code of the pixel color under your cursor and copies it to your clipboard.

#h::
MouseGetPos, MouseX, MouseY
PixelGetColor, color, %MouseX%, %MouseY%
StringLower, color, color
clipboard := SubStr(color, 3)
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The moral of the story is, with these hotkeys you can really customize your workflow to make it work best for you with little effort.

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Gil Blinov •

Good one. There's so much more that can be done.

I still have a script from 2012 to resize windows for side by side work and more.

Windows 10 has made this obsolete.