Creating macros

[IAmAndre]

Hi,

 

I've started a new job a few months ago, in which I have to do some quite repetitive tasks that I would like to automate. One of these is to read emails and extract some information to fill out some forms. So I would like to make this task easier for me by buying a new mouse with multiple extra buttons like this one (although the exact model doesn't really matter for now). For this particular task for example I would like a click on the button 1 to copy the selected text or paste what's in the clipboard if no text is selected. The idea would be to assign to each button a particular type of information and avoid to go back and forth between the forms and the email.

 

This is just one workflow but there are some other things that I would like to automate for totally different tasks. However I've never done it in the past, but I have a programming background so I wouldn't mind writing some code myself if needed. But I would like to know where to get started: is there a manufacturer offering a better/easier way to do such customizations? I can see that Taran is using Logitech peripherals so I am leaning towards this but I'm still not sure what's the best approach so any help/directions would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

[minibois]

Taran uses the hotkey buttons on his devices to do complicated macros (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Tab+Some F key, combinations you wouldn't press on your own) to trigger an AutoHotKey script, which does the actual macro. This makes it so it doesn't matter what manufacturer you get the mouse/keyboard from.

AutoHotKey is a program kind of meant for the sort of purpose you mention, automate certain features. It has become kind of a programming language on its own, where you can automate kind of simple, or quite difficult key combinations.

[IAmAndre]

5 minutes ago, minibois said:

Taran uses the hotkey buttons on his devices to do complicated macros (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Tab+Some F key, combinations you wouldn't press on your own) to trigger an AutoHotKey script, which does the actual macro. This makes it so it doesn't matter what manufacturer you get the mouse/keyboard from.

AutoHotKey is a program kind of meant for the sort of purpose you mention, automate certain features. It has become kind of a programming language on its own, where you can automate kind of simple, or quite difficult key combinations.

That's pretty awesome. Thank you for this. I think AutoHotKey is exactly what I was looking for.