The other day, I came across a problem I frequently seem to encounter. I had a group-chat in Skype that I wanted to follow, but not necessarily contribute much to, and due to how often it was updating, it was getting annoying to have to constantly stop typing in my full-screen IDE and alt-tab back to Skype. I realized that it would be much more efficient if I could somehow temporarily designate that Skype window to always stay on top of the screen, the same way Task Manager does. That way I could be working away in my IDE, and when there were new messages in Skype I simply had to glance over, rather than alt-tab.
Naturally, I assumed this was a problem that was already solved, and a little Googling led me to a handy always-on-top toggle script that is activated using a hotkey. Perfect! Download, install, run, and within a few seconds I had my desired functionality… only the hotkey that the script uses to toggle the always-on-top property is ctrl-space, the same shortcut used for the absolutely-necessary auto-complete feature in Eclipse.
The script doesn’t provide any means for changing the hotkey, so I had to get a bit more creative. I set out on what I thought would be the difficult quest of figuring out how this script was made and re-making it with a different hotkey (I ended up using caps-lock). To my utter disbelief, it only took about five minutes. There were a few reasons why this was so easy to do, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first here is the script in case it might be useful to anyone else:
Download my Capsatop utility for Windows XP
No, I didn’t test it in Vista or Win7. Yes it might still work; please let me know if you try it. If you’re curious about doing this in linux or OSX, you’re on your own, but I’d love to hear about that too :~)
Now then, the rest of this post will be about why this was so easy to do, with a few lessons about good software tool development practices. For starters:
It helps when things are open-source.
That handy page I mentioned earlier was kind enough to mention that their ctrl-space script was made using a tool called Autohotkey, which I’d never heard of, and that it was only one line, which they provided:
^SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A
So I downloaded Autohotkey, and braced myself for the impending learning curve. Fortunately, I was in for a shock:
Autohotkey is an incredibly intuitive tool.
It literally took me under two minutes to install Autohotkey, grok how it worked, and recreate the script with the line of code above. I credit this entirely to Autohotkey’s development team for putting together a really easy-to-use slice of utility software. Here are the things it got spot-on:
The editor literally doesn’t let you do anything other than type out .ahk files. This is key; don’t let me fret over which filetype to save in, force me to use one option that is guaranteed to work.
The converter has a dead-simple UI. A field asking for an .ahk file, a field for specifying the path for the .exe, and a giant button that says “Convert”.
Without reading any documentation or having any experience with this tool, it took minutes to accomplish a simple, but specific task. All software should work like this. I shouldn’t have to read any documentation to figure out how to use the core feature of your application. That said:
Autohotkey’s documentation is excellent, from what I saw.
I say “from what I saw” because I didn’t have to look at very much of it (which, again, is the way it should be). All I wanted to do was change the hotkey I already knew about from ctrl-space to something more convenient, so I pulled up the AHK docs, which had a very convenient Hotkey pages summarizing exactly what I wanted to know (and nothing more).
All I had to do was skim through this one, short page to find a better hotkey. About two screen-lengths down I saw a note on how to disable caps-lock (this is perfect; I never use caps-lock—ever—and it’s a nice big key that’s easy to hit). Even though the docs actually use num-lock in their welcomely-concise code-sample, I was able to take a pretty reasonable guess at the syntax for disabling caps-lock and how to override it to run my always-on-top line. Back in the editor, I made the small change, switched back to my converter and hit that big, impossible-to-miss convert button again (without re-entering my filenames) and… it worked on the first try! I was speechless — five minutes.
2 replies on “A Cool always-on-top Keyboard Toggle and a Lesson in Software Tool Development”
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A fantastic post. I am by no measure a geek, but still thanks to your post, I followed the same steps and experience as you did and now I have always on top with windows+t and a few other shortcuts are in the pipeline. All this started from reading your post 30 mins ago..thank you again