AutoHotkey is a very slick and simple program for doing cool things with shortcuts on Windows. I’m using this to create a Quicksilver-like command line for my most common tasks.
AutoHotkey is a very slick and simple program for doing cool things with shortcuts on Windows. I’m using this to create a Quicksilver-like command line for my most common tasks.
Give Colibri a try. It is certainly prettier and has similar functionality. I use it a lot when I’m on my laptop and have to use the touchpad.
Autohotkey is pretty cool. At some point when I was using Windows on a daily basis, I had written some simple little macros for it (see http://marc.abramowitz.info/archives/2005/04/19/autohotkey/).
As far as something like Quicksilver for Windows, I’ve never tried Colibri but I am a big fan of SlickRun.
Is AutoHotkey anything like Launchy? http://launchy.net/
Paul, I believe Colibri is more like Launchy, AutoHotkey is an entire automation/scripting util to do a ton of automated tasks… basically throw out your mouse and use three keys for for creating your next WP theme kinda deal (that’s an exaggeration :P), while Slickrun (direct link to homepage) is somewhere in between.
I personally use Slickrun. It’s definitely far from eyecandy like Colibri and Launchy have but all around it’s a good compromise of easy to set up for what you need it to launch/automate while still being powerful for that stuff you tend to do a lot. Autohotkey encompasses more but I believe takes a bit more work to set things up for… or at least you’ll end up spending lots of time doing stuff even if you don’t need to. 😉 For a killer combo try Slickrun or Autohotkey along with AutoIt3. You’ll be extremely efficient but you won’t ever do anything but write scripts and tweak things to make you more efficient. Hehe.
Only caveat with Slickrun is I’m not sure if the current version is being worked on anymore. The author started coding a version of it like 9 years ago in Delphi and the latest 3.x versions are still in Delphi. He’s now planning on releasing 4.0 completely rewritten from scratch in MSJava… er, C# and I have no idea when that’ll be released or if it’ll ever take off since he’s involved in some other heavy projects, one of which I know was working on IE7. I’ll be using the 3.x version for a while anyway as it’s rock solid on XP and already has a ton of user created stuff available for it.
It really just comes down to a matter of how much of what you want out of such utils.
This script saved my life twice.
Once: I needed to make a game for in-store advertising and thought I’d have to resort to using Director, but after finding this I could use Flash and just route joystick movement and buttons to arrow keys and letters.
Twice: My laptop’s CONTROL key doesn’t work any more. It only has one. Simple fix; just route left ALT to CONTROL. Everything works (except CONTROL+ALT+DELETE).
Don’t forget AppRocket! Though, none of these are quite on the level of Quicksilver. The last time I tried AppRocket and other launchers for Windows AR was the one that stood out the most to me.
ActiveWords (www.activewords.com) is another one you should check out.