AutoHotKey: MyLittleHelper – Making tech life easier

This is a fairly short post, but it’s really to the point. The power of AutoHotKey continues to impress and be incredibly useful. If you know how to use AutoHotKey, you know exactly what I’m discussing. I use AutoHotKey in just about everything I do… and just about everything I write.

I’m a person that has a fascination with words, alternate words and learning new words. So the other day I found myself jumping back-and-forth with Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Google Translate and just doing some standard Google searches.

The epiphany was to write a quick set of code to help me out.. I just wanted to share this.

So, the goal was to automate the process of copying the text and then pasting it to the websites I was using the most… The way this works; I would highlight the text and then use the key combination to launch the options.

For me, I was using the Windows key + left-click… you could change it to what ever suits your needs.

From this point, I can choose an option and the selected text is copied and then sent to the Internet to be researched/queried; or whatever you’d like to do with it.

For this example I chose the Dictionary [Dictionary.com]…

Obviously, you can change the website you’d like to use with some small code changes…The browser that’s used is going to be whatever your default browser is; there’s no designation there.

Here’s the AutoHotKey Code…

#lbutton::

clipboard=

send ^c

clipwait,1

DTMENU:

Menu,convert,Add

Menu,convert,Delete

Menu,convert,Add,&Dictionary,dtdiction

Menu,convert,Add,&Thesaurus,dtthesaur

Menu,convert,Add,&Google Translate,dttransla

menu,convert,add, &Google Search,dtGSearch

Menu,convert,Show

Return

dtdiction:

Traytip, MyLittleHelper, Dictionary search

run, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%clipboard%

return

dtthesaur:

Traytip, MyLittleHelper, Thesaurus search

run, http://thesaurus.com/browse/%clipboard%

return

dttransla:

traytip, MyLittleHelper, Google Translate`n%clipboard%… 

run, http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|%clipboard%

sleep, 3000

return

dtGSearch:

traytip, MyLittleHelper, Google Seaarch`n%clipboard%…

run, https://www.google.com/search?q=%clipboard%

sleep, 2000

return

As you can see, it’s not complicated… You can take this, drop it right in to an autohotkey script and your set.

But for the purposes of convenience, I’ve compiled it and put it in to an executable…

MyLittleHelper [205k - EXE]  DOWNLOAD IT

I hope this helps…

Thank you,
Larry Henry Jr.
LEHSYS.com