Last night I wrote a post for Download Squad about AutoHotkey. I just had to repost it here:

The other night as I was trying to fall asleep, I made a mental note to search for a utility that I would like to have that I figured probably didn’t yet exist, or at least not in a way that would be useful to me. I wanted to be able to remap hotkey assignments in a way that is contextually valid depending on the application I’m in. In other words, I’d like to be able to create consistent hotkeys regardless of the program I’m in, so that pressing a given keystroke always performs a similar action. In my case, I have been using an email client for awhile (NEOPro) that has some pretty well thought out and easy to use hotkeys, like pressing space marks a message as read, shift-space marks it unread, the backspace key will file the message, etc. I wanted to be able to have the same keystrokes perform the same actions in Outlook. It turns out that the application I was looking for already exists, and even better, it’s free! And the kicker is that it’s far more powerful than just remapping keys, though it does that job extremely well. It’s called AutoHotkey. Now I must warn you that this is a bit of a geeky tool in that there is no GUI for setting up hotkeys; you have to learn AutoHotkey’s scripting language. Thankfully, it’s quite simple, and doing a few quick searches for example code will almost always help you find what you’re looking for. I have to say, I’m in love with this program.