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Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by geocrasher on Sunday October 27, 2019 @11:56PM (#21374118)
My typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better.

I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux commands that I don't remember of are awkward to type. Like 'awk1' becomes "awk '{print $1 }'" and then I can modify it as needed.

This has worked extremely well for me for many years. Ymmv.

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by rolleiflex on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:16AM (#21374216)
I wonder if it would be possible to build an app that's effectively a self-installed keylogger given access to your entire stream of writing, and after a few days, it starts to recommend candidate strings for automation with Autohotkey.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by WrtCdEvrydy on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:31AM (#21374287)
This was the idea behind the Blackberry Android keyboard.

Source: Was there, wrote code for it.

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by nickthemagicman on Monday October 28, 2019 @10:02AM (#21377060)
sounds like code that could be useful to this day at least the concepts. That's the downside of closed source. It's gone now.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by snthpy on Monday October 28, 2019 @11:47AM (#21377976)
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by wyre on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:44AM (#21374343)
I think it could. It could log words for a certain amount of time, give a list of recommendations, and export it as a AutoHotkey file.

It would be a neat project at the very least.

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by throwaway123x2 on Monday October 28, 2019 @11:38AM (#21377909)
My Samsung keyboard on my S6 does this.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by SN76477 on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:03AM (#21374142)
Autohotkey doesn’t get enough attention. Great software.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by tomjuggler on Monday October 28, 2019 @01:52AM (#21374597)
Are you using wsl because AutoHotkey doesn't work on Linux...

Back when I was on Windows I used to have ctrl-c, ctrl-v mapped to F1 and F2 keys (using AHK). Why they don't have dedicated keys I don't know

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by geocrasher on Monday October 28, 2019 @09:15AM (#21376629)
I'm on Windows 10. When I'm using it in Linux, it's via SSH through Mobaxterm, which is a fantastic and free Windows shell manager.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by jeromescuggs on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:48PM (#21378659)
are you using it for remotely accessing linux boxes? mintty+wsl-bridge aka wsltty has really come a long way in a short time, and i'm beginning to use it even for remote work alongside using it for wsl. call me shallow but it really boils down to it looking far, far better when staring at a vim buffer for hours...

i absolutely love mobaxterm, but there's alot of cases where it seems like overkill for my purposes. that being said, nothing beats mobax when it comes to a stupid easy X server for windows. vcxserv and x410 are both nice and getting nicer, but you gotta sit down and work out kinks to make either one really useful

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by geocrasher on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:53PM (#21378734)
Yup, logging into web servers at work. I haven't messed with WSL much except for having a local Linux environment for local work. I have a home server for anything more serious than that such as hard drive recoveries and the like. I discovered Mobaxterm some years back and have stuck with it. It really is nice. While it may be overkill, I've had to do things like open up RDP on multiple boxes and wow... it Just Works. It's a hidden gem.
Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by jeromescuggs on Monday October 28, 2019 @04:47PM (#21381475)
mobaxterm helped me get serious about security when i ran the ssh server once and used the easy menu options to view who was knocking on my doors, and... man. people think the robocallers are persistent...

i did a little screenshot ( https://i.imgur.com/HndJDqg.png ) to demonstrate how far WSL has come - though i must admit i am using the paid ($10) 'pengwin/wlinux' distro that was built specifically for WSL, basically debian with some tweaks and a config menu not unlike the 'raspi-config' menu on an RPi. i would say that it has absolutely been worth it though. it will be some time before being able to install something from a debian repository, and then open it from my windows start menu, ceases to just leave me in awe.

Re:Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? by davchana on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @10:31PM (#21405181)
Awesome :)

I do the same on my android with app Textpander (no affili, just a happy user). I also listed my shortcut phrases at https://dav.today/my-text-shortcut-phrases/

You are welcome is yawc Ty is Thank You