Business @ BrandonGreenlee.com

We are in the middle of yet another product development phase. This requires large amounts of product descriptions to be edited into a standard HTML format. Very grunt-level work, but since we are building every description using the same guidelines, it would be immensely helpful if we were able to link the most used HTML tags to different key combinations.

I’ve searched many times for this type of software before. All of what you come across is either crippled shareware or other useless spam. This time, however, I finally came across a free open-source piece of software that makes all of my dreams come true. Like most open-source software, it is initially rather unintuitive and unbelievably flexible, but after a few minutes of actually reading the help file (ugh) it was working perfectly for me.

http://www.autohotkey.com/

Below I have pasted the basic AutoHotKey.ahk file that I am using for my project. Simply, I have mapped the 4 functions I am looking for to the arrow-keys, which are activated by hitting Ctrl+Alt+ArrowKey. In AHK, Ctrl is defined as ^, Alt is defined as !, and the arrow keys are simply the direction of the key. The double colon :: signifies the end of the key combination required to trigger the action. Send places the following text in the active window, while return ends the function.

^!left::
Send <br>
return

^!up::
Send <ul><li>
return

^!right::
Send <li>
return

^!down::
Send </ul>
return
—–

Ctrl+Alt+UpArrow, now out puts <ul><li> into my active window (notepad++.) I have these arranged in the order I am using them, so I can just follow a left-up-right-down flow for every product I work on. I only wish I had come across this software sooner.

Sometimes solving the littlest of headaches can truly mean the difference between productivity and frustration.