Programs I Use To Automate Stuff: I – Autohotkey

Autohotkey is an incredibly useful programmable hotkey utility for Windows. When you hear the term ‘hotkey’ you probably think of something like using ctrl + a to highlight text, or win + d to show your desktop. Now, true, these kinds of shortcuts are useful, and speed you up no end, but Autohotkey allows you to take the humble hotkey to a whole new level. Almost anything you can think of can be assigned to a hotkey. You could:

• Create simple programs to carry out repetitive tasks while you relax.
• Create a program to automate tedious game sections, or allow you to achieve a bragably high score.
• Reconfigure the buttons on programs that don’t have this functionality built in, to make life easier for yourself.
• Create your own personalised set of shortcuts to do the things you do daily. (You could press shift + e, say, to check all your email and social networking accounts).

Clearly I could go on. Because Autohotkey is somewhere between simple hotkey utility and powerful programming language, there is little limit to what you can do, whilst at the same time the learning curve isn’t very steep at all. Especially if you have any previous programming experience. Two final things, although I’m using it on Windows right now, I think you can also run it on Linux using WINE, and lastly, Autohotkey also enables you to create GUIs, so the world really is your oyster.

Go download it here.