Authotkey and Eclipse Autocomplete

Friday 8 January 2010 - Filed under Code

Yesterday I was trying to write up a quick AutoHotkey script to quickly dump in a Fusedoc snippet into my files.

I was tearing my hair out (I don’t have much left!) because I kept getting extraneous characters printing out after the script ran.  After quite a bit of trial and error it finally dawned on me what was happening.

I was using SendInput in AutoHotkey to print out characters and when running this in Eclipse the autocomplete was kicking in!  So if I entered “<”  it would throw in “>”.   I tested this by running the same script in Notepad and it printed out fine.

I was a bit stumped but someone on the AutoHotkey forum suggested using the clipboard instead!!  This morning I tinkered a bit and rewrote my script to instead append everything to the clipboard and then paste it.

First we need to setup our clipboard:

clipboard =

That was easy :)   Now we can simply append items to it.  The `r`n is a line break.

clipboard = %clipboard% <!--- `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard%    %fuseDocResponsibility%`r`n
...

Then finally we can dump it back to the screen by doing a CTRL+V:

...
clipboard = %clipboard% ---> `r`n
send ^v

By using the clipboard this pastes as one item into Eclipse and bypasses the autocomplete!  The full script is below:

:*:;fd::
FormatTime, TimeString, ShortDate
SetKeyDelay, 20 ;in millisceonds
InputBox, fuseDocResponsibility, Attribute Prompt, Responsibility..., , 300, 150
If ErrorLevel = 1 ; They clicked cancel
return
Sleep, 100

clipboard =
clipboard = %clipboard% <!--- `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard%    %fuseDocResponsibility%`r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard%    `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard%    `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard%    `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% `r`n
clipboard = %clipboard% ---> `r`n
send ^v
return

2010-01-08  »  Jim Priest