idlethreat

AHK is an excellent scripting program that's been around for a number of years now. In it, you can create hotkeys and macros for Windows systems to carry out a bewildering array of tasks.

I'm a Mac guy who, due to the nature of my work, has to spend a whole lot of time on Windows systems at work. Of all the Mac hotkeys that I miss terribly, + W (close window) is probably going to be at the top of my list. So, with a little hacking around last night I've successfully crafted up a hotkey (I use + W due to its location on the keyboard) which closes the foremost open window.

Window Closer

HotKey, #w, WindowCloser
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

WindowCloser:
WinGet, active_id, ID, A
WinClose ahk_id %active_id%

The only real caveat to it is that Windows task management sees open windows as instances of applications. Close a window and you (may) close the application altogether. The Mac sees all open windows as children of the application. Close all the open windows, and the application is still running (and still requires a + q to quit it). However, it pretty much works as advertised pretty much everywhere. I will warn you that applications like Firefox will just close altogether when this hotkey is used. So, keep using your + w in Windows to those those tabs individually.

And Others…

While working on that script, I managed to fire off a couple of more scripts that will make things handy for me that I thought I'd share. This one will open up a new Explorer window in whatever folder you wish it to (I defaulted to the C: drive, but that can be changed). This is another Mac hot key that I have always liked. This hotkey is kicked off by using the + n keys.

HotKey, #n, NewExplorerWindow
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

NewExplorerWindow:
Run C:

; This one will open up an explorer window on your personal desktop
;Run C:Documents and Settings%username%Desktop

And finally, this one creates a new email whenever you hit the + e keys. I send a whole bunch of emails off every day and know it will be terribly useful here in the very near future.

HotKey, #e, EmailMaker
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

EmailMaker:
Run mailto:

How to Implement?

Grab and install a copy of AHK on your windows systems and either copy-paste in my examples that I have above into new .ahk files, or just [Download Here].

Once you have them on your system and unzipped, edit the files to your liking and run them as is. If you want them to be runnable executables (I.E. .exe files), right-click on them and select “compile script” from the list.

I just remembered only after writing this was the rather huge project that I once wrote up in AHK at work. This was a few years ago and I was working in the NOC at a web hosting company (that I'm still at, by the way). One issue we alway seemed to run into was running down websites on IIS servers so we could troubleshoot them.

I wrote an AHK script that would pull all the active sites from IIS and copy them over to a Linux server. the Linux box would parse the list (as a .CSV) and inject them into a MySQL database. I wrote a PHP front end to the entire mess and you could perform boolean searches on site names and which server they were parked at.

It was a hackish affair, abd prone to failure, but at the time there was nothing quite like it for a number of years until that functionality was added into our current ERP system. I think I still have the source code for Badger somewhere around here.

Would be interesting to see those scripts again.

Ok, well, enjoy these for now.

Cheers,

tom