Jack’s AutoHotkey Blog

The Best Type of Brain Food!
Get Started with AutoHotkey with this
“Introduction to AutoHotkey
A Review and Guide for Beginners“

See Also, Jack’s New Beginner’s Guide to AutoHotkey

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October 11, 2018

Useful when you need it, “Swapping Variable Values (Beginning AutoHotkey Tip).”

October 8, 2018

I just published my latest book Jack’s Motley Assortment of AutoHotkey Tips. It’s a big one with over 80 chapters of miscellaneous tricks and techniques. Click the links below to review the “Table of Contents” and “Index“, plus learn how AutoHotkey Library Members can get a discount.

September 28, 2018

Up for some word counts?

September 21, 2018

Want to mess with the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of your Windows operating system? See “Adjust Windows Registry Settings with the AutoHotkey RegRead and RegWrite Commands.”

September 14, 2018

A quick and dirty trick with Ryan’s RegEx Tester!

September 7, 2018

Working on the upcoming book. Here you’ll find some raw code and future topics “A New Hotstring Trick and Converting Dates in Documents into DateTime Stamps (Coming Soon!).”

August 31, 2018

For a close examination of the code in the HowLongYearsMonthsDays.ahk script, see “Calculating Timespans in Years, Months, Days in AutoHotkey, Part 2 (Understanding the HowLong() Function)“.

August 29, 2018

I’ve rewritten the age calculating function (years, months, days). I now understand how it works.

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Swapping Variable Values (Beginning AutoHotkey Tip)

Rather Than Rewriting Code, Sometimes You’ll Find It Easier to Swap Variable Values

You may not need to use this technique very often but when you do, it can save you a lot of time.

Calculating Years, Months, Days Problem

I wrote the HowLong(FromDay,ToDay) function to calculate the difference between two dates in years, months, and days. The way the function operates it starts at the first date (FromDay) and works its way forward to the second date (ToDay). If the first date occurs after the second date, the function yields bad results.

Originally, I added a trap to notify the user when the first date occurred after the second date—offering an opportunity to try again. However, I eventually realized that I only needed to reverse order of the dates to yield the right answer. Rather than rewriting a ton of code to create a backward-looking function, I left the original logic untouched by swapping the two date values when in reverse chronological order.

New Book of Jack’s Motley Assortment of AutoHotkey Tips

 

Jack’s Motley Assortment
of AutoHotkey  Tips

A Living Book

This first edition of my new book Jack’s Motley Assortment of AutoHotkey Tips includes more than 80 chapters of AutoHotkey tips, tricks, and techniques. But, that only reflects the starting point for this Living book. Every six months to a year, I will add 30 or more new chapters based upon my current explorations of AutoHotkey. If you purchase this book, you will get all of these new editions free. You only need to buy this book once.

To review the “Table of Contexts” and “Index”, see this Motley Tips page.

Counting Words with AutoHotkey (RegEx)

How You Count Words Depends Upon How You Define a Word

While working on my new book, I finished up a chapter where, in response to a reader’s question, I demonstrated how you can count commas in a document with both the StringReplace command and the RegExReplace() function. The StringReplace command responds to the UseErrorLevel parameter to save the count while the RegExReplace() function automatically counts the number of matches for saving in an OutputCountVar variable. That gave me the idea to write a word count script using RegExReplace().

Adjust Windows Registry Settings with the AutoHotkey RegRead and RegWrite Commands

Sometimes a Simple Script Offers the Best Way to Learn More Advance Techniques in AutoHotkey

I’ve just posted a script written years ago by Robert Ryan (the person responsible for the very capable RegEx Tester) which displays hidden files by changing settings in your Windows Registry—a trick you can apply to many other Windows settings if you know where to find them.

The problem with setting folders or files to Hidden in their Properties window (right-click on selected folder or filename in Windows File Explorer and click Properties at the bottom of the menu) involves losing sight of them forever. Since the listing disappears from view, you can forget that it even exists. Windows offers a multi-step procedure for making all Hidden folders/files visible, but who can remember that? This simple UnHideFiles.ahk script saves the stress.

A Simple AutoHotkey RegEx Trick to Print a List

Sometimes I Find It Quicker to Use Ryan’s RegEx Tester to Make a Clean List

While working on my current book, I found that I needed a printed list to keep track of my progress. In many circumstances, computer-based lists work fine but sometimes I want a piece of paper which I can markup with checks, arrows, and extraneous comments. The paper sits on my desk as a working tool—never hiding behind an open window on the computer screen. It seems archaic but, for me, it’s just easier. My problem involved printing a clean list of chapters without a load of extras.

A New Hotstring Trick and Converting Dates in Documents into DateTime Stamps (Coming Soon!)

Making a List of Future Blogs While Sequestered

Right now, the massive book of motley AutoHotkey tips consumes the vast majority of my time. Therefore, I have less blogging time. However, I don’t want my lack of blogs to make anyone think I sit idle. In the course of the current task at hand, I’ve accumulated even more topics which I need to blog about:

Calculating Timespans in Years, Months, Days in AutoHotkey, Part 2 (Understanding the HowLong() Function)

Taking a Close Look at the HowLong() Function for Calculating Years, Months, and Days

In this blog, I discuss in its entirety the most recent AutoHotkey code for the HowLongYearsMonthsDays.ahk script (introduced in my last blog). I’ve broken it up into snippets in order to explain the purpose of each piece. To get a complete copy of the script check out HowLongYearsMonthsDays.ahk at the “ComputorEdge Free AutoHotkey Scripts” page or for a barebones version (without comments and inactive code) see “Function Calculating Timespan in Years, Months, and Days” at the AutoHotkey Forum. This blog reviews the nuts and bolts of calculating the timespan between two dates.