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New program: Ethervane ActiveHotkeys (freeware)
tranglos:
Sweet, thanks.
You might add a button to start a scan for such programs?
-DonationCoderTransmit (May 06, 2009, 02:02 AM)
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I'm not sure what you mean. There is nothing to scan for, as there is no standard manner in which programs store information about the hotkeys. It depends on how and where programs keep their configuration data: in the registry, in ini files, in xml files (at various locations). Then there are programs with hard-coded hotkeys, which are not configurable, so not stored anywahere, either.
The shortcut map program you referred to does the only thing that's possible - it scans the shortcuts in the Start menu. I's probably not a very well-known Windows feature, whereby you can assign a hotkey to each .lnk shortcut, so that you can start the program without clicking the link in the Start menu. That's detectable, because the hotkeys are stored inside the shortcut (lnk) files, and I'll see if I can add this to my program.
However, this is only a very narrow use of hotkeys, and it will do nothing about all the applications that register global hotkeys at runtime to perform various functions, e.g. when you press Pause to bring up Find and Run Robot, or PrintScreen to activate a screenshot application, etc.
For those - most common - cases, there is no way to find out which app "owns" a hotkey. I've posted a question at StackOverflow, so if it's possible, someone is likely to reply - but there are no replies so far. In general, it seems impossible to extract the necessary information from Windows; that possibility was simply not built into the system.
tranglos:
Great ideas all, thanks!
1) Consider renaming the Active Hotkeys tab or having separate tabs for Active and Inactive hotkeys. I was a bit confused when seeing inactive hotkeys listed on the active hotkeys tab until I found the Show Active Only option.
-TheQwerty (May 06, 2009, 06:09 AM)
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You are right, I'll rename it. I don't want to use separate tabs though. For now you can right-click and check the option to only display the active hotkeys. At the very least I should add the opposite option, to only show inactive ones.
2) While selecting the modifiers and key groups before scanning allows you to scan for less shortcuts, checking everything didn't seem to take that long. It might be more useful if you just scanned for everything and then allowed the user to filter the results based on selected modifiers and key groups.
-TheQwerty (May 06, 2009, 06:09 AM)
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The UI for filtering is already there (hidden), but filtering itself isn't implemented yet.
2a) Extending that a bit it would be nice if the user could filter it even further by somehow entering keys. Say I wanted all shortcuts that use F1, I could sort the list, but I think a filter would be better.
-TheQwerty (May 06, 2009, 06:09 AM)
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This definitely needs to be a part of the filter, yes.
3) While you cannot determine the program associated with the hotkey, you could allow the some user entered data. In particular, if you allowed the user to group hotkeys, enter the program they are associated with, and maybe a small note of what they did, it would become so much more useful. Obviously, it would fall on the user to ensure this data is updated and accurate. Granted, you'd probably have to replace the list view to do this cleanly, but with such a feature it would turn the program into something I might even consider purchasing for a small fee.
-TheQwerty (May 06, 2009, 06:09 AM)
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I love this idea, thanks again. Now that I think about it, I can detect the hotkeys defined in lnk shortcuts (see my reply to DonationCoderTransmit above), and can have a built-in map of well-known Windows hotkeys (Win+R, Win+E, etc). THat would be a start. The rest, as you say, could be filled in by users.
Too bad we cannot have a shareable list of such hotkeys, since in most apps thay are configurable, and will be different for everyone. FARR uses Pause, for example, but there is no guarantee that Pause is mapped to FARR on any particular system.
ewemoa:
This looks like a handy program! Thanks tranglos :Thmbsup:
MerleOne:
Excellent ! Thanks, I have been looking for this for quite some time...
PhilB66:
Very nice.
Can you put the .ini files in the ActiveHotkeys folder?
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