AutoHotkey is a free open source tool that does all kinds of cool things, one of which is hotstrings.

Hotstrings allow us to define shorthand phrases that get expanded into full text. For things we type often, creating hotstrings can save us valuable keystrokes.

Once AutoHotkey is installed, we can edit the script and add our hotstrings.

So, if we typed “dontcodetired.com” often, we could define a hotstring like this:

::dct::dontcodetired.com

Now when we type “dct” followed by an ending key such as space or enter, the “dct” gets auto-replaced with “dontcodetired.com”.

If we want the replacement to happen as soon as the last character is typed (in this case the “t”) and not have to press an ending key we add an asterisk after the first colon:

:*:dct::dontcodetired.com

Now as soon as the “t” key is pressed the replacement happens immediately.

To find out more about hotstrings and the other cool features of AutoHotkey, check out my Pluralsight course: Personal Productivity & Performance Tools for Windows Developers

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