Save some time and energy while using your PC with these key-friendly super devices
It’s just sad to see how people don’t exploit the full potential of their function-filled keyboards and mice. Just imagine how convenient it would be to start applications with just the press of a button, rather than awkwardly fumbling your way through menus and prompts. So, this week we have decided to feature some applications that will boost your productivity by helping you transform your normal keyboard and mouse into key-friendly super-devices.
The mouse
As you might have guessed, it’s not easy to enable automated actions through your mouse, especially when you have only two buttons to work with. But with the mouse’s functional ability, you can surely transform the simplest of tasks like drawing a line into a virtual hotkey. Just download a freeware called Strokeit and you’ll be ready to use gestures to control activities in your computer.
Starting the application will make a mouse cursor appear on your system taskbar, on the bottom-right corner of the screen. Any gestures you now make holding the right button of your mouse will be analysed and matched by Strokeit against predefined gestures. For example, drawing a “C” on any window will close it, and drawing an “E” will open a Windows Explorer window. Strokeit comes with tonnes of other programme-specific built-in doodles.
You can also create your own action-specific gestures—just fire up the programme and select “Global Actions” tree, click “edit” and select “Learn Gestures”. Now draw a gesture clicking the right button on your mouse, if the gesture is not already available in Strokeit database, you can assign a new action to your gesture by clicking the “New Gesture” button.
The keyboard
Everyone must be familiar with the good old Ctrl+C hotkey. If you can assign such hotkeys to some regular tasks, it would be easier to remember-thankfully, there is a freeware just for this purpose: WinHotKey. Once you’ve installed and navigated past tutorial screens, you will see a list of hotkeys that are already configured in your system. You can either keep them by doing nothing, or remove them by clicking “Remove Hotkey”. Once you are ready to assign actions to your preferred hotkey, click “New Hotkey”. Now enter a helpful description in the provided field. When you’re finished, the application will give you some options for what you want the actual keystrokes of hotkeys to be. WinHotKey will not let you to overwrite Windows default hotkeys permanently, so it’s better to choose your custom combination of keystrokes. After you have done so, select your action via the ‘I want WinHotKey to...’ menu, and you’re done! By default, WinHotKey loads when Windows starts up, so your customized hotkeys will always be part of your operating system.
Macros
A macro is basically is a chain of programmed actions that occur each time you hit a specific button. But unlike its younger cousin Hotkey, macro is quite difficult to configure. People familiar with macros in Excel would know how tough it is. But first, you need to install an application called Autohotkey to start assigning macros to your preferred key. When you install the application, it will ask you wheather you want to load a default hotkey script, affirm that you do. Since, Autohotkey is a script-based application, you will see the scripting languages next. And since there is no user interface available to assign macro actions, you will have to type them all by yourself using appropriate codes. Due to space limitations, we cannot walk you through the tedious scripting process. But you can certainly learn about syntaxes and conventions from Autohotkey’s website.
Written by Prajjwol Gautam & Ashwin Joshi, The Kathmandu Post, February 24, 2011 edition.
