An Introduction to AutoHotkey

For an answer to the question, "What is AutoHotkey?" see AutoHotkey.

Why Learn AutoHotkey?

Well, if your daily driver laptop or desktop computer is a Mac or runs some variant of Linux, this is really easy to answer—you shouldn't! AutoHotkey is a Microsoft Windows-only program.

But if your primary computer is a Windows machine, you should learn AutoHotkey because it will save you time by letting you automate keystrokes and mouse clicks. Depending on what you most frequently use your computer for, this can become extremely handy.

Overview of This Guide

AutoHotkey can do a lot of things. I will walk through only five of those things, because they are the functions I find most handy and use most often:

Key rebinding
Custom keyboard shortcuts
Hotstrings
Custom right-click menus
Keychords

I'll also walk through how I personally use AutoHotkey in my Personal Knowledge Management Workflow. Finally, I'll give you some snippets that you can use or adapt for your own purposes.

Here's an overview of this introduction's eight parts:

📄️ Part 1: Getting AutoHotkey

In this section I'll walk you through downloading and installing [[AutoHotkey]]. I'll also recommend a simple [[Workflow]] and related [[Tools]] for creating and editing [[AutoHotkey]] scripts.

📄️ Part 2: Key Rebinding

To "rebind" a key means to set a key on your keyboard so that when you press it, your computer interprets it as a different key. [[AutoHotkey]] is great for this!