road to automation…

If you haven’t used AutoHotkey before, you should check on YouTube what it can do or try sample scripts from their website.

I think AutoHotkey is great productivity tool and my script is longer every day. One of the things I use AutoHotkey for is for code snippets.

I never really tried code snippets in Visual Studio, but I found code templates in Eclipse really useful and easy to define and use.

With this AutoHotkey script I came close to what I was used to in Eclipse:

; * XML
::<wo::
   PasteText("<word id=""Clip0"">`r`n <slo></slo>`r`n <eng>Clip0</eng>`r`n</word>")
Return
; * PHP
::-br::<br />
::-ph::
   PasteText("<?php`r`n`?>")
Return
::-sc::
   PasteText("<script>`r`n</script>")
Return
; * VISUAL STUDIO
::#ef::
   PasteText("#if r2010`r`n#else`r`nClip0`r`n#endif")
Return

; PasteText function
PasteText(text)
{
   CurrentClip=%Clipboard%
   StringReplace, replaced, text, Clip0, %Clipboard%, All
   Clipboard=%replaced%
   Send, ^V
   Sleep, 50                    ; Don't change clipboard while pasting! (Sleep > 0)
   Clipboard=%CurrentClip%           ; Restore original ClipBoard
   Clip0=
}

In the above code, the text ‘Clip0’ is replaced by clipboard content, so in case if I type ‘<wo’ and I have text ‘Hello world!’ in clipboard, this is the resulting text:

<word id="Hello world!">
  <slo></slo>
  <eng>Hello world!</eng>
</word>