Keystroke Recorder

[Guest Chopianissima]

Hi,

New to AutoIt, new to this forum. I'd like to introduce myself a bit. I'm among a growing group of people who are exploring AutoIt to enhance the functionality of ActiveWords, a program that allows you to use keyboard and other commands to trigger PC actions. Command types range from launching an executable file, substituting text, sending an email message and opening a web page to some more sophisticated scripting. AutoIt complements ActiveWords wonderfully because AutoIt scripts can be compiled into .EXE files, which then can be called from an active word. The ActiveWords scripting language is relatively simple compared to AutoIt (see the ActiveWords command language reference). ActiveWords is used by people who prefer to have their hands on the keyboard and who focus on optimizing their keyboard productivity. Experienced users on the ActiveWords user forum frequently recommend using AutoIt, so you'll probably meet with more of us in the future.

One of the features we dearly miss in the current version of ActiveWords is a keystroke recorder to facilitate the creation of an ActiveWords command script. Currently sequences like <BACKSPACE> and <SHIFT><TAB></SHIFT> need to be entered manually, which often causes scripts to fail at runtime because of typing errors.

I'm wondering if AutoIt could be of any help to us.

The recorder I have in mind would basically allow to start, stop and pause the registration of a sequence of keystrokes. It is essential that every keystroke is also executed normally in the currently active application. From my limited knowledge of the capabilities of AutoIt, the AutoIt script would scan for a particular global hotkey (let's say Ctrl-Shift-F9). As soon as that key is recognized, AutoIt registers every keypress and appends it to a variable that eventually is pushed onto the Windows clipboard when the recording is finished. Special keystrokes should be saved like this: <F1>, <BACKSPACE> and so on, according to the ActiveWords syntax.

The next step will be to take the contents of the Windows clipboard and paste it into an ActiveWords command script.

I would appreciate your help in this very much. Note that in order to understand my request you don't really need to know ActiveWords, but as I'm pretty much addicted to it, I of course encourage you to download ActiveWords Plus and play around with it. In turn I'd be delighted to show you some nice applications of it.

Kind regards,

Marjolein Hoekstra

[SmOke_N]

ezzetabi's Keylogger

[Guest Chopianissima]

Thanks so much for the extremely fast reaction.

Now I will definitely need to dive into this, because I also want the key presses to be propagated to the currently active application.

Thanks again!

[layer]

There's also "HotKeySet("key", "function")"

[JSThePatriot]

You also may want to check with some of the creators of the AU3Recorder and/or AutoItMacroGenerator.

JS