Hotkeys for workspaces

[Λύχνις Δαν]

This probably isn't wisdom but .... following from thread http://www.accordancebible.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14691 here is something you might wish to try. It's a lengthy slightly OT thread so I've created a new post for it.

 

Ok so I thought I had tried this before with AutoIt but clearly I had not. It can be done but there are thorns. It is easy to choose a shortcut key that messes with other applications on Windows. But if you are adventurous and would like to try some Windows Accordance automation you can set up a hotkey to do this. Here's how.

 

0. First - realize that this is likely not very viable. It wants for elegance on a rather substantial scale. I'm not sure it's worth it. You can get very strange behaviour out of your PC if you pick the wrong shortcut keystrokes. I am trying to put all the disclaimers upfront. The hard part of this is the keyboard shortcut not AutoIt.

 

0a. Why did I bother to even try ? Well some people climb mountains, others climb trees, some climb walls, no idea - because I wanted to know if it could be done. BTW AutoIt3 is useful for other things with Accordance like batch automation which is actually more interesting I think.

 

0b. You're still reading - ok then - you were warned - off you go ...

 

1. Download AutoIt3 : https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/

 

2. Get this script into a file :

 

; Activate the Accordance window

AutoItSetOption("WinTitleMatchMode", 2)
WinActivate("[TITLE:- Accordance; REGEXPCLASS:Accord*]")

send("!f")
for $x = 1 to 8
send("{DOWN}")
Next
send("{RIGHT}")
send("{ENTER}")

 

The way this works is way primitive but it does work. It sends keystrokes to Accordance.

!f activates the File menu.

Hitting the down arrow 8 times gets you to the Open Workspace menu.

Right takes you into that menu

Enter in this case selects the first workspace in the list. You could insert more down arrow calls to select others.

You need to make it select the correct workspace by configuring the script to match your Open Workspace menu.

 

The implication is that the workspace needs to be in the menu which means you need to have marked it a favorite, but then you probably would have if you want a shortcut for it.

 

Test the script by running it before proceeding to create the shortcut.

By the way - if AutoIt interests you get the SciTE4AutoIt3 editor. It makes editing and running tests easier.

 

3. Use the Aut2exe.exe (or the 64 bit variant) to compile this file to a .exe file.

 

4. Create a shortcut to this exe. For reasons that I do not understand you need to pin this shortcut to the Start menu. If you don't the keyboard shortcut will not find it.

 

5. Set a hot key for this shortcut - be careful what keys you choose - try to avoid the ctrl key as you can mess up firefox without too much trouble so that you mouse thumbwheel goes into zoom in/out mode for it. Very annoying. I used shift-F6 in the end.

 

6. With Accordance open your shortcut will open the workspace.

 

Thx

D

Edited December 5, 2014 by Daniel Semler