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Hotkeys to control windows?

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Brig:
Hi Folks:

I'm new to FARR--just learning how to use it. I've been using a launcher called Executor for several years; it's an indexing launcher and is pretty good really, but I wanted to try something else. FARR seems great, but one thing I really miss from Executor is the ability to set a hotkey to minimize the active window. Executor has internal keywords that handle such activities. Can FARR do this? I searched the forum and perused the online help, but I couldn't find anything. I find myself tapping Ctrl-[down arrow] and nothing happens!

Thanks for helping out a newbie.

Brig

mouser:
Hi Brig,

Welcome to the site and to farr :)

You could actually set up FARR to do what you want:

* You would do it by setting a custom hotkey in FARR, and specify a search string to trigger when you hit that hotkey
* And then use an alias pack like this one which includes commands to manipulate the last active window.  I think the exact text you'd use with that would be  "Window Management Minimize\n".
However, let me say that this sounds messy because it is messy to do in FARR, because FARR is not meant to be used to provide hotkey triggering of generic actions like window controls.  There are a lot of hotkey programs that can so this kind of stuff really well, and a lot of people on DC use the AHK language to write scripts to handle hotkeys and manipulate windows.. And it seemed like not a great idea to try to make FARR a generic program for handling hotkeys and macros.

In short, you can do it in FARR but you probably shouldn't.  If you like configuring hotkeys to do things, do yourself a favor get yourself a nice hotkey program, there are a lot of good free ones (here's just one example).

ps. Where FARR can excel and do things better than hotkey programs is if you like to press a hotkey and have FARR pop up with a MENU of options.. In this case you can easily set custom hotkeys in FARR that tell FARR to display and start out with a search string you specify, which can match an alias that shows choices you can select from, etc.

Brig:
Thanks Mouser. I really appreciate it. I think I'll try out what you say I "probably shouldn't" do, just to get my hands dirty with this kind of thing. I'll also check out a hot key program.

Thanks again. :)

skajfes:
I use a slightly modified version of the nircmd alias to minimize or maximize last active window.

So here's what I added to the alias(I am pretty sure that this is not in the default):

--- ---1000>>>Max>->Maximize last active window | %ALIASDIR%\nircmd.exe win max handle %LASTHWND%
1000>>>Min>->Minimize last active window | %ALIASDIR%\nircmd.exe win min handle %LASTHWND%
1000>>>Restore>->Restore last active window | %ALIASDIR%\nircmd.exe win normal handle %LASTHWND%
1000>>>Center>->Center last active window | %ALIASDIR%\nircmd.exe win center handle %LASTHWND%

[tip]You can watch this screencast about aliases where you can see how to import this (i think  :-\)[/tip]

rjbull:
If you like configuring hotkeys to do things, do yourself a favor get yourself a nice hotkey program, there are a lot of good free ones (here's just one example).

ps. Where FARR can excel and do things better than hotkey programs is if you like to press a hotkey and have FARR pop up with a MENU of options.
-mouser (November 17, 2010, 11:35 AM)
--- End quote ---

The example is HotKeyz, which indeed is a good one - and I'm pretty sure you can build mini-menus with it.  You certainly can with HotKeyP.  Not sure whether they'd have the power you'd want, you'd have to check.

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