The Creation of a Custom Windows Script for Increased Productivity

Having to constantly search for and navigate through menus can be frustrating, especially when it comes to simple tasks that can be accomplished with a single button click. This is where customizing one's Windows environment comes into play. A great example of this is the creation of a custom script using AutoHotkey, a scripting language that allows users to automate repetitive tasks and create shortcuts.

One of the first modifications made was replacing the pause/break button on the keyboard with a custom function. This button, which was previously only used in specific situations, can now be used for a more universal purpose - taking screenshots of open windows and pasting them into Microsoft Paint. To achieve this, the user needs to press the Alt key and then the Print Screen key simultaneously, which will capture the current window's screenshot and save it as an image file on the desktop.

However, there was one complication with this new function - by default, the image size set in Microsoft Paint would be too large for most screenshots. To overcome this issue, the user had to manually adjust the image size each time they took a screenshot, ensuring that no extra white space appeared when saving and closing the image file. It may seem like an unnecessary step, but it's one that makes a significant difference in the overall usability of the script.

Another modification made was replacing the caps lock key entirely with a custom function. This allowed the user to quickly search for text selections without having to manually right-click on them. The process is simple: highlight some text and press the caps lock key, which will then trigger a Google search using that highlighted text as the query. It's a clever solution that streamlines the search process significantly.

Lastly, the creation of an AutoHotkey script was implemented to force the Control V key to work in the Command Prompt. This is a small but useful modification that allows users to quickly paste and edit text within the command prompt window. The change may seem minor, but it's one that makes a noticeable difference for those who frequently use the Command Prompt.

The final step was adding these customizations to an existing AutoHotkey script called "Windows Mod Script". The script is made up of several code snippets, each designed to improve the user experience and automate routine tasks. As the project continues to evolve, it's likely that more modifications will be added, expanding the capabilities of the script even further.

In conclusion, the creation of a custom Windows script using AutoHotkey has greatly improved the productivity of the creator. By automating simple tasks and providing quick access to features like screenshot-taking and text searching, this script has streamlined the user experience and saved time in the long run. The project serves as a great example of how one can customize their Windows environment to suit their needs and create shortcuts that make life easier.

For those interested in creating their own custom AutoHotkey scripts, the full code is available on the GitHub repository for reference. Simply copy and paste the script into a Notepad file, save it with a `.ahk` extension, and run it to see the modifications in action. Add it to your startup files to ensure it runs automatically each time you boot up your computer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso this is a little bit of a different video from what I normally put out and it's kind of a followup to some other videos that I've made or I guess one other video in which a follow-ups been requested I don't entirely know where the series is going to go but for those who wanted to know where my programming Noob uh Vlogs and videos were where they were going to go I haven't figured it out yet uh for my learning and experience I have been playing around with auto hotkey as kind of inspired by ter from Linus techtips he's been helping out via his own work with my Premier mod scripts but I put together a kind of compilation script of some windows mods that I use to make my Windows Experience a little bit better and this is all written in the auto hotkey format so you will need Auto hotkey installed and then this will run I have the scripts stored in just a windows mods folder in my documents folder I originally had them as separate scripts but I'm I've compiled them into a cohesive single script and then I just posted a shortcut in my startup folder and then the script automatically starts up and then I have the no tray icon option set so that way it doesn't take up system tray space so the tools that I have available is that when Windows Explorer is running contrl Z does not work if I press it just makes a big loud beat and that is intentional because I have had a lot of issues and this was specifically when I first moved into my first apartment I actually lost moving Vlog footage because I had copied it over from an SD card to my documents folder renamed something and when I hit control Z instead of undoing the rename it undid the copy well it was a cut it was a move off the SD card and the footage was gone it was unrecoverable off the SD card and windows just erased it out of nowhere so immediately I looked for a solution to get rid of control Z so now I can no longer press that on Windows Explorer which makes my life easier so that's what this first chunk of codee does uh I I have a whole video dedicated to that from where I had originally made it the next one adds in a little bit of some functionality that I have in Linux and Ubuntu in that I get really annoyed with having to go through the menu options especially when I have a lot of this hidden to enable hidden folders and file extensions so I wrote out a mod that when you press Windows H the Windows key plus h it hides or shows hidden folders you can see like the app data folder and the eclipse data folder here if I hit Windows H it it it ties the hide file or hide hidden items extension which by the way I usually don't have this ribbon enabled I have a mod that gets rid of this ribbon as part of a separate video that I'm uploading soon so normally the check checkbox isn't that handy but this will work in just about any Windows modern Windows version so it takes that checkbox and then refreshes Explorer to either show it or hide it the same thing with Windows y it does that for file extensions you can see ISO ISO goes away ISO pretty straightforward pretty easy and makes my life a little bit easier for some keyboard shortcuts save some time clicking as well this one's a little silly these are all work in progress I will be updating these on my uh GitHub page here I do have a GitHub and I just uploaded the repository for the windows mods so I will have to check that uh let's get rid of insert fix all right so on my GitHub I have a lot of stuff I've been working on including my branch of the Premier macros uh but under Windows mods here I have the full script but I'll be up updating it over time currently I have it set to where if I hit alt three it Maxes my as a window I don't have a toggle for this so I can't hit it again nothing happens um it just maximizes it once a little bit handy still trying to figure out the toggle haven't gotten there yet this next one uh replaces insert with contrl v I've never once in my entire life used the insert key the way that it was originally intended to like overwrite text and anytime I accidentally hit it it drives me nuts so why not make it to where if I copy that and hit insert it paste obviously control+v is memorized into my brain more so than anything else but having that one button in case my finger already up there makes my life a little bit easier this next one was a little more complicated this actually replaces the pause break button another button on the keyboard that I've never actually used in my entire life for anything that it was meant for so this replaces the pause break button and you may sort of have to recode this if it doesn't work on your keyboard sometimes the pause or break button uh comes in as a different button you'll have to look at Auto hotkey site for the keys to or the key documentation to see what the other options are but for me this one works and what it does is it sends alt print screen which takes the window screenshot pastes it into Ms paint and saves it to the desktop and allows you to type in a name and hit enter I use a program called light shot which allows me to take screenshots and do whatever with them but if I real quick am sending a window-based screenshot to a person all I got to do is hit pause opens it up pastes it saves it and then I can name it whatever and already have the screenshot ready now you have to do a little bit of preparation for this because by default in paint oh yeah and it automatically closes paint once you hit save which is convenient but not when I'm trying to show you this so by default with paint your image size is like super big so then if I paste in screenshot that is smaller than this you have a bunch of extra white space that it's saving so what I ended up going in and doing which now I just screwed up but is creating an image size of 50x 5050 or I'll just make it really small like that so that way no matter what it's guaranteed that anything I paste in here is going to be bigger than this because you can't set like a Default Resolution in paint it's not that complex of a program it just loads whatever the last you know whatever it was last time you used it so if I set it like this and then close close it whenever I hit pause and good that that's what size that was that way you don't end up with any extra white space and then it even when you save and close this it's still that smaller size so you you got to do a little extra preparation work the first time before you start using this but then it's coming a little handy for me another one replaces the caps lock entirely I I don't use it a whole lot I I may disable this if I come to miss it but I kind of liked on my Chromebook how the caps lock button was actually a search button so now if I highlight text and hit caps lock it Google searches that text pretty cool I I like it and it's quicker even in Chrome then like right clicking and going to search this text and then when I try to do something else again with it I realize it hasn't actually copied it to the clipboard this actually copies it to the clipboard it's kind of Handy and again you can piece together which ones of these you want from my GitHub lastly I just forcefully enabled contrl V to work in the command prompt obviously if you're doing something in which control V does not involve pasting this kind of breaks that for the most part that's not the case for me now with Windows 10's command prompt you can actually wow Mine my colors got reset that sucks uh you can actually edit some preferences for it now and stuff it's got a decent amount of customization which is which is nice uh but if you're on a different Windows version or just don't want to deal with the command prom options and just want to force it then you can do it that way so that's all the code that I've gathered here in my current draft of the windows Mod script again I will be adding to this as I find other things that I wish to do these are fairly basic but things that just save me a little bit of time that aren't totally stolen from someone else so I've uploaded it here in the GitHub you can go here and go to Raw not blame I don't even know what blame is Go to Raw copy paste it into your notepad file save it as. ahk if you have Auto hot key installed it just double click it it'll run it add it to your startup yada yada download link in the description below let me know what you think about it or if you have any suggestions of similar things that I might want to try out Auto hot SK Auto hotkey scripts wise and if you end up using it and finding it useful let me know in the comment section down below as well that would be interesting to see otherwise I'm aples Fox thank you so much for watching smash the like button if you enjoyed get subscribed for more Tech videos and I'll see you next timeso this is a little bit of a different video from what I normally put out and it's kind of a followup to some other videos that I've made or I guess one other video in which a follow-ups been requested I don't entirely know where the series is going to go but for those who wanted to know where my programming Noob uh Vlogs and videos were where they were going to go I haven't figured it out yet uh for my learning and experience I have been playing around with auto hotkey as kind of inspired by ter from Linus techtips he's been helping out via his own work with my Premier mod scripts but I put together a kind of compilation script of some windows mods that I use to make my Windows Experience a little bit better and this is all written in the auto hotkey format so you will need Auto hotkey installed and then this will run I have the scripts stored in just a windows mods folder in my documents folder I originally had them as separate scripts but I'm I've compiled them into a cohesive single script and then I just posted a shortcut in my startup folder and then the script automatically starts up and then I have the no tray icon option set so that way it doesn't take up system tray space so the tools that I have available is that when Windows Explorer is running contrl Z does not work if I press it just makes a big loud beat and that is intentional because I have had a lot of issues and this was specifically when I first moved into my first apartment I actually lost moving Vlog footage because I had copied it over from an SD card to my documents folder renamed something and when I hit control Z instead of undoing the rename it undid the copy well it was a cut it was a move off the SD card and the footage was gone it was unrecoverable off the SD card and windows just erased it out of nowhere so immediately I looked for a solution to get rid of control Z so now I can no longer press that on Windows Explorer which makes my life easier so that's what this first chunk of codee does uh I I have a whole video dedicated to that from where I had originally made it the next one adds in a little bit of some functionality that I have in Linux and Ubuntu in that I get really annoyed with having to go through the menu options especially when I have a lot of this hidden to enable hidden folders and file extensions so I wrote out a mod that when you press Windows H the Windows key plus h it hides or shows hidden folders you can see like the app data folder and the eclipse data folder here if I hit Windows H it it it ties the hide file or hide hidden items extension which by the way I usually don't have this ribbon enabled I have a mod that gets rid of this ribbon as part of a separate video that I'm uploading soon so normally the check checkbox isn't that handy but this will work in just about any Windows modern Windows version so it takes that checkbox and then refreshes Explorer to either show it or hide it the same thing with Windows y it does that for file extensions you can see ISO ISO goes away ISO pretty straightforward pretty easy and makes my life a little bit easier for some keyboard shortcuts save some time clicking as well this one's a little silly these are all work in progress I will be updating these on my uh GitHub page here I do have a GitHub and I just uploaded the repository for the windows mods so I will have to check that uh let's get rid of insert fix all right so on my GitHub I have a lot of stuff I've been working on including my branch of the Premier macros uh but under Windows mods here I have the full script but I'll be up updating it over time currently I have it set to where if I hit alt three it Maxes my as a window I don't have a toggle for this so I can't hit it again nothing happens um it just maximizes it once a little bit handy still trying to figure out the toggle haven't gotten there yet this next one uh replaces insert with contrl v I've never once in my entire life used the insert key the way that it was originally intended to like overwrite text and anytime I accidentally hit it it drives me nuts so why not make it to where if I copy that and hit insert it paste obviously control+v is memorized into my brain more so than anything else but having that one button in case my finger already up there makes my life a little bit easier this next one was a little more complicated this actually replaces the pause break button another button on the keyboard that I've never actually used in my entire life for anything that it was meant for so this replaces the pause break button and you may sort of have to recode this if it doesn't work on your keyboard sometimes the pause or break button uh comes in as a different button you'll have to look at Auto hotkey site for the keys to or the key documentation to see what the other options are but for me this one works and what it does is it sends alt print screen which takes the window screenshot pastes it into Ms paint and saves it to the desktop and allows you to type in a name and hit enter I use a program called light shot which allows me to take screenshots and do whatever with them but if I real quick am sending a window-based screenshot to a person all I got to do is hit pause opens it up pastes it saves it and then I can name it whatever and already have the screenshot ready now you have to do a little bit of preparation for this because by default in paint oh yeah and it automatically closes paint once you hit save which is convenient but not when I'm trying to show you this so by default with paint your image size is like super big so then if I paste in screenshot that is smaller than this you have a bunch of extra white space that it's saving so what I ended up going in and doing which now I just screwed up but is creating an image size of 50x 5050 or I'll just make it really small like that so that way no matter what it's guaranteed that anything I paste in here is going to be bigger than this because you can't set like a Default Resolution in paint it's not that complex of a program it just loads whatever the last you know whatever it was last time you used it so if I set it like this and then close close it whenever I hit pause and good that that's what size that was that way you don't end up with any extra white space and then it even when you save and close this it's still that smaller size so you you got to do a little extra preparation work the first time before you start using this but then it's coming a little handy for me another one replaces the caps lock entirely I I don't use it a whole lot I I may disable this if I come to miss it but I kind of liked on my Chromebook how the caps lock button was actually a search button so now if I highlight text and hit caps lock it Google searches that text pretty cool I I like it and it's quicker even in Chrome then like right clicking and going to search this text and then when I try to do something else again with it I realize it hasn't actually copied it to the clipboard this actually copies it to the clipboard it's kind of Handy and again you can piece together which ones of these you want from my GitHub lastly I just forcefully enabled contrl V to work in the command prompt obviously if you're doing something in which control V does not involve pasting this kind of breaks that for the most part that's not the case for me now with Windows 10's command prompt you can actually wow Mine my colors got reset that sucks uh you can actually edit some preferences for it now and stuff it's got a decent amount of customization which is which is nice uh but if you're on a different Windows version or just don't want to deal with the command prom options and just want to force it then you can do it that way so that's all the code that I've gathered here in my current draft of the windows Mod script again I will be adding to this as I find other things that I wish to do these are fairly basic but things that just save me a little bit of time that aren't totally stolen from someone else so I've uploaded it here in the GitHub you can go here and go to Raw not blame I don't even know what blame is Go to Raw copy paste it into your notepad file save it as. ahk if you have Auto hot key installed it just double click it it'll run it add it to your startup yada yada download link in the description below let me know what you think about it or if you have any suggestions of similar things that I might want to try out Auto hot SK Auto hotkey scripts wise and if you end up using it and finding it useful let me know in the comment section down below as well that would be interesting to see otherwise I'm aples Fox thank you so much for watching smash the like button if you enjoyed get subscribed for more Tech videos and I'll see you next time\n"