4 ms·

AHK is what keeps me on Windows

by csdvrx 4y ago

I_complete_me 4y ago
I was a Windows guy: And when I moved to Linux I made some notes that I might have problems because of: AutoCAD - true Photoshop - true SketchUp - true AHK - not so much. Autokey does what I need. But I still have great time for AHK - which is why I looked at this thread. Yeah, there's GIMP and Blender and SU online but these applications were really ace on Windows. I found a way to live without them all.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > I found a way to live without them all. I'm not willing to sacrifice my productivity for some ideological purity. It would take weeks to create a fraction of what AHK already does for me with scripts I have improved every year. I tried to explain in another thread some of the remappings I have: like how Caps often ends us remapped to Esc (when alone) or Control (in conjunction with another key: act as a modifier) on MacOS, my 2 shifts and 2 alt do their normal modifier function (when used in conjunction with another key) but when used by themselves act as PageUp/PageDown Home/End Going up 2 pages up in the browser? The left shift pressed twice (Shift Shift) gives me 2 PageUp. Top of the page? Alt gives me Home. Bottom? The other Alt gives me End. Select from the point of edition to the beginning? Shift+Alt does Shift + Home. It's not the homerow, but it's 2 keys easy to reach, and never missing (unlike the actual PageUp which is often Fn + something - no I don't want to turn that into 3 or 4 keys). Yes, doing Cap s=> Esc or Control is possible on Linux, but the rest will be complicated. And it's just one of the many things AHK does for me! Here's another example: a partial screenshot into a base64 encoded PNG is just 2 keys away. It might be possible to do all that on Linux, but last time I tried to get something a fraction as good as mintty (with ligatures, italic, sixels...) the best I could get was a pimped xterm. For what I do, the tooling is just much better on Windows - and yes, you may not believe it, but even for tty/console things.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > Going up 2 pages up in the browser? The left shift pressed twice (Shift Shift) gives me 2 PageUp. Is this on a device with a tiny keyboard, or is it really something you do so often you want it on the main area instead of pressing PageUp twice?
    - gertlex 4y ago
      This AHK hotkey sounds like a thing I'd do (and I use AHK as well): /Sure/ I can scroll with mouse or page-up, but that needs my right hand. And I eat at my computer while reading sometimes... So I put a scrollball on the left side of my keyboard. (though spacebar and shift+spacebar generally work too) https://hackaday.io/project/203-keyboard-with-apple-mouse-scroll-ball https://hackaday.io/project/203-keyboard-with-apple-mouse-sc...
xM4ZX9PxWOxm 4y ago
Keyboard Maestro for macOS is great although it's not free like AHK.
williamdclt 4y ago
On MacOS there's a few options: Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Karabiner, Hammerspoon. Most of them aren't free and I haven't found any of them to be better than AHK, but they do the job well enough that it's certainly not a reason to look back fondly to Windows despite my lack of enthusiasm for MacOS.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Its very easy to add a feature with Karabiner Elements as it can download scripts from a repo. Hammerspoon too, has a lot of snippets and scripts available (I haven't used BetterTouchTool as I avoided touchbar Macs). That's one of the strong points with AHK. I look up a syntax or example code and boom (and I am a lousy programmer so if it works for me, that says something). But I got AHK running in Wine on Linux, and on another Linux machine with Wayland I got simple rebinds and simple scripts working with keyboard and mouse (which I could extend with say Python scripts from AutoKey?). Its more difficult on Linux, but its possible.

AHK is what keeps me on Windows

by csdvrx 4y ago

AHK is what keeps me on Windows

I was a Windows guy: And when I moved to Linux I made some notes that I might have problems because of: AutoCAD - true Photoshop - true SketchUp - true AHK - not so much. Autokey does what I need. But I still have great time for AHK - which is why I looked at this thread. Yeah, there's GIMP and Blender and SU online but these applications were really ace on Windows. I found a way to live without them all.

csdvrx 4y ago
> I found a way to live without them all. I'm not willing to sacrifice my productivity for some ideological purity. It would take weeks to create a fraction of what AHK already does for me with scripts I have improved every year. I tried to explain in another thread some of the remappings I have: like how Caps often ends us remapped to Esc (when alone) or Control (in conjunction with another key: act as a modifier) on MacOS, my 2 shifts and 2 alt do their normal modifier function (when used in conjunction with another key) but when used by themselves act as PageUp/PageDown Home/End Going up 2 pages up in the browser? The left shift pressed twice (Shift Shift) gives me 2 PageUp. Top of the page? Alt gives me Home. Bottom? The other Alt gives me End. Select from the point of edition to the beginning? Shift+Alt does Shift + Home. It's not the homerow, but it's 2 keys easy to reach, and never missing (unlike the actual PageUp which is often Fn + something - no I don't want to turn that into 3 or 4 keys). Yes, doing Cap s=> Esc or Control is possible on Linux, but the rest will be complicated. And it's just one of the many things AHK does for me! Here's another example: a partial screenshot into a base64 encoded PNG is just 2 keys away. It might be possible to do all that on Linux, but last time I tried to get something a fraction as good as mintty (with ligatures, italic, sixels...) the best I could get was a pimped xterm. For what I do, the tooling is just much better on Windows - and yes, you may not believe it, but even for tty/console things.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > Going up 2 pages up in the browser? The left shift pressed twice (Shift Shift) gives me 2 PageUp. Is this on a device with a tiny keyboard, or is it really something you do so often you want it on the main area instead of pressing PageUp twice?
  - gertlex 4y ago
    This AHK hotkey sounds like a thing I'd do (and I use AHK as well): /Sure/ I can scroll with mouse or page-up, but that needs my right hand. And I eat at my computer while reading sometimes... So I put a scrollball on the left side of my keyboard. (though spacebar and shift+spacebar generally work too) https://hackaday.io/project/203-keyboard-with-apple-mouse-scroll-ball https://hackaday.io/project/203-keyboard-with-apple-mouse-sc...

xM4ZX9PxWOxm 4y ago

Keyboard Maestro for macOS is great although it's not free like AHK.

williamdclt 4y ago

On MacOS there's a few options: Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Karabiner, Hammerspoon. Most of them aren't free and I haven't found any of them to be better than AHK, but they do the job well enough that it's certainly not a reason to look back fondly to Windows despite my lack of enthusiasm for MacOS.

Fnoord 4y ago
Its very easy to add a feature with Karabiner Elements as it can download scripts from a repo. Hammerspoon too, has a lot of snippets and scripts available (I haven't used BetterTouchTool as I avoided touchbar Macs). That's one of the strong points with AHK. I look up a syntax or example code and boom (and I am a lousy programmer so if it works for me, that says something). But I got AHK running in Wine on Linux, and on another Linux machine with Wayland I got simple rebinds and simple scripts working with keyboard and mouse (which I could extend with say Python scripts from AutoKey?). Its more difficult on Linux, but its possible.