Category: programming

A couple of weeks back, I posted a semi-useful AutoHotKey script, just a little script to paste text from the clipboard, but stripped of formatting. Well, I did some searching, and of course, I’m not the only person to have come up with this basic script. This guy posted a similar script, a couple of years ago. The one thing I learned from his script, which I somehow didn’t think of myself, is that, rather than sending the clipboard contents using “SendInput”, it’s better to put the text back on the clipboard, then send ctrl-V. The reason this works better is that, in most applications, a paste is an atomic operation that’s easily undoable, whereas using SendInput appears to the application as though you just manually typed out the contents of the clipboard.
I also decided to disable the macro in Excel, since I have an existing macro in Excel that’s mapped to ctrl-shift-V, and I don’t want to override that. So, bottom line, the macro now looks like this:

#IfWinNotActive Microsoft Excel 
^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
clipboard := %myStr%
Send ^V

Still nothing terribly amazing, but very useful, and something I was living without for longer that I should have.

I’ve been using AutoHotKey for a while now. I’ve got a few macros programmed into it that are pretty much wired into my brain at this point. There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to write for the last year or so, and just never got around to it. Well, I was in the middle of something on Friday, and I just decided that I needed to stop what I was doing, and just figure out how to write this macro. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I though it was going to be! Now I feel kind of stupid for putting it off for so long.

Basically, I wanted a macro that would do a “Paste Special / Text Only”. Mostly, I needed this in Lotus Notes, but there are other apps where it could come in handy. Long ago, I’d taken care of this in Word with a simple one-line VBA macro. But, I never really knew how to do this in Notes. The reason I need this, is that I’m often pasting text from Word, or a web page, or some other app, into Notes. The text goes to the clipboard as formatted text, and if I just do a straight paste into Notes, all the formatting info gets pulled in, and it’s usually not a good match for the default e-mail formatting in Notes. So, I’d settled on just selecting Edit, then Paste Special, then Text from the menus. But that’s a lot more work than pressing Ctrl-V.

Before yesterday, I’d never looked at the AHK docs closely enough to realize how simple this was. The contents of the clipboard, in plain text format (that’s the key there!) are available in a system variable called “clipboard”. So, all I really needed to do is call SendInput on that. Duh. Just to get fancy, I also decided that I wanted to trim trailing whitespace from the clipboard contents. So, here’s a simple macro that trims trailing whitespace from the contents of the clipboard, and sends it out:

^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
SendInput %myStr%

I just have that mapped to Ctrl-Shift-V, so I can paste text anywhere, without formatting, no problem. And, yes, I could have written this in one line, but I broke it up so it would be easier to see what I was doing.

The point of this story, I guess, is that AutoHotKey is a wonderful thing, and that some things are simpler than you think they are, if you just sit down and spend a few minutes reading the docs.