Tip: Clip-board macros with TextPipe and AutoHotKey

[Ville]

Some time ago I decided to automate frequently recurring text-mangling operation with help of TextPipe and an excellent freeware program AutoHotKey.

With TextPipe I first created a filter that takes input from the clip-board and outputs the result back onto the clip-board. The most recent of these macros (see the attachment) turns a list or URLs on the clip board into active HTML for the purposes of easily displaying them in a browser from a local file which in turn makes it possible to quickly queue them in DownloadThemAll which doesn't otherwise support URL bulk entry.

Once complete and saved into a TextPipe filter folder, I created a keyboard macro in AutoHotKey to make it easy to quickly execute the macro against the current clip-board contents:

^+L::Run "c:\Program Files\TextPipe\textpipe.exe" /MINIMIZED "/F=e:\_Documents\TextPipe\Linkify.fll" /G /Q

Now the workflow is like this: 1) copy a list of plain-text URLs onto the clip-board, 2) hit Ctrl-Shift-L 3) Paste the URLs that are now in URL format into a local HTML doc and preview it in Firefox (then select DownThemAll from the context menu and they're queued for download).

Obviously this is just an example and can be applied to any frequently repeated text/data processing routine. AutoHotKey is also extremely flexible allowing mapping over system default hotkeys such as Win-E, as well as re-mapping useless keys (like th §/½ -key below Escape on my Finnish keyboard) into new altering keys (many of my keyboard macros including the TextPipe macros run with the §/½ -key plus some other key).

Linkify.zip

Contains a TextPipe macro that turns list of plain-text URLs on the clip board into HTML URLs.

(656 Bytes) Downloaded 955 times

[DataMystic Support]

This is terrific - thankyou!

Would it be possible for to also post this in the AutoHotKey forums at http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/forum-2.html for the benefit of their users?

[Ville]

That's a good idea. I'm registered at the AutoHotKey forums so I'll cross-post there, or at least include a brief description along with a link to my post here.

[DataMystic Support]

Thank you!