I downloaded AutoHotkey recently for something not Excel related. Well, it was kind of Excel related so I guess I’ll tell the story. I’ve been using the Save As feature of my Kwik Open add-in and really enjoying the lack of folder navigation. But it has sewn the seeds of discontent. When I’m doing a Save As in other programs, like a PDF viewer, I don’t get the keyboard love. I got AHK so I could quickly jump to some of my favorite folders without leaving the keyboard.
But then I got to thinking about other ways I could use this tool. One of my pet peeves about the Visual Basic Editor (and there are many) is that typing “endif” will auto-expand to “End If”, but typing “endwith” just sits there like an insolent child. I thought maybe I could fix that with AHK. And I could. But that wasn’t enough. Check out these two AHK scripts I wrote.
#IfWinActive ahk_class wndclass_desked_gsk
::with::With{Enter}End With{Enter}{up 2}{end}
:*:then`n::Then{Enter}{Enter}End If{Enter}{up 2}`t
The first line tells it to only work in the VBE window and it comes with a windows spy utility to find out the ahk_class of whatever window you like. The second line monitors for when you type the word “with”. When you do that, it replaces it with With and End With – even better than expanding endwith. Then it moves the cursor back up to the With line so you can continue coding. If you type “with” inside a comment, it’s trouble. So that’s something to work on.
The third line looks for when you type “then” and press Enter. It replaces it with an If block and puts the cursor in the middle, ready for more code.
Watch the video to see it in action. I’m not sure why the video is blurry at the start nor do I know how to fix it.
As you might guess, I’m going to love this.
