Use HotStrings in your Dev Life to increase your daily Productivity with AHK

Cover Photo by Александар Цветановић on Pexels

Contents

• What are AHK's HotStrings?
• Hotstrings we are going to create
• Hotstrings types
• Creating our Hotstrings

What are AHK's HotStrings?

HotStrings in AutoHotKey "shortcuts" that are mainly used to expand (or auto-replace) abbreviations as you type them:

Hotstrings can be also used to launch any scripted actions (like the macros used in the previous posts).

Hotstrings we are going to create

Let's see what Hotstrings we are going to create today:

• Some basic HTML tags for anchors, lists
• Autocomplete syntaxes for print, loops, conditionals, functions in your favorite programming language
• Dates in any format that we want (eg. dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy, HH:mm)

Hotstrings types

Before we jump in to create some HotStrings, let's see a few differences between the two types of HotStrings:

• Hotstrings that are triggered after pressing an ending character (eg Space, ., or Enter)

::forloop::for (let i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {

• Hotstrings that are triggered right after you wrote them (they contain an * - asterisk)

:*:printc::printf('%d\n', num);

:*:<a>::<a href="" title=""></a>

Okay, why is this important?
Well, if we are going to use only hotstrings that are triggered right after writing them (*), we have to make sure don't use keywords containing other used keywords inside them:

:*:printMe::console.log();
:*:printMeToo::System.out.println(); 

The printMeToo hotstring will never be triggered, because printMe will always trigger before we can write 'Too'.

Another example:

Note that hotstrings aren't case sensitive by default (you can read more here but it's not mandatory for our next hotstrings).

Another important aspect of these types of hotstring is their usage in different text editors. For example, we would use a hotstring triggered after Enter for for loops, because the editor will auto-close the brackets.

Creating our Hotstrings

Okaay, we already saw a few hotstrings. Let's jump into creating more! As we noticed, a hotstring starts with ::, followed by their triggering keyword, then :: again, and ends with the actual string used. So the syntax looks more or less like this:

::Keyword::String
:*:Keyword2::String2

Also, it's important to note that if we want to create hotstrings that use multiple lines, we need to use parentheses ( ):

::quickfox::
(
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
But no one asks how the fox feels...
)

Or another example:

:*:mysignature::
(
Yours faithfully,
John Doe

john.doe@domain.com
www.johnnydoe.com
)

• Good, let's quickly write some auto-completion for HTML tags:

:*:<a>::<a href="" title=""></

::<ulli>::
(
<ul class="navbar-nav">
<li class="nav-item"><a href=""></</
<li class="nav-item"><a href=""></</
<li class="nav-item"><a href=""></</
</
)

However, the hotstrings for HTML tags really depend on the text editor that is currently used... For example, Sublime Text auto-closes opened tags after writing </.

Hmm, okay:

• Let's write a print statement in the following languages: C, Matlab, JavaScript, Java, C#:

:*:printc::printf('%d\n', num);
:*:printm::fprintf('%d\n', num);

:*:logjs::
{
Send, console.log();{Left}{Left}
Return
}

:*:printjava::
{
Send, System.out.println();{Left}{Left}
Return
}

:*:writec#::
{
Send, Console.WriteLine();{Left}{Left}
Return
}

Nice. "Debugging" will be a little easier now.

Okay sorry for that. Note that for JS, Java and C# we used multiple instructions (macros) instead of a simple string (we used these a lot in previous parts of this post).

• Let's see how we will write some loops in C, JavaScript, Python, and Matlab.

::forC::
(
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
)

::forJs::
(
for (let i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
)

::forPy::for i in range(0, len(arr)):

:*:forMatlab::
(
for i = 1:step:length(arr)

end
)

• Finally, let's see a really useful feature of hotstrings, namely: Date types. Let's write the following scripts:

:*:datenow::
{
  FormatTime, DateString, , dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy
  Send %DateString%
  Return
}

:*:timenow::
{
  FormatTime, DateString, , HH:mm
  Send %DateString%
  Return
}

Here's more info about dates and time formating in AHK.

Let's see another useful scenario for using dates:

:*:datetoday::
{
  FormatTime, DateString, , yyyy-MM-dd
  Send %DateString%
  Return
}

:*:datetmr::
{
  Date += 1, Days
  FormatTime, DateString, %Date%, yyyy-MM-dd
  Send %DateString%
  Reload ; Return and clear variables
}

Note that for datetmr we now used AHK variables such as %Date% in our script, and we also used Reload instead of Return. If we use Return, we won't clear the created %Date% variable, and each time we wrote datetmr hotstring, we will get the next day of the day before and so on.

"The End" Movie Vector by Vecteezy

This was the last part of my AutoHotKey series for increasing productivity. I hope that I got some of you into using macros and how beneficial they could be in multiple scenarios, or at least you got some other ideas for automating boring stuff with them.

Okay done. Happy coding and keep improving!
R.B.