Right-click menu for all your scripts (or: single shortcut for all your scripts)

Hello everyone

It would seem that while everyone has a set of his favourite scripts, these scripts tend to have all separate shortcuts to activate them, and sooner or later you're going to run out of potential shortcuts.  It may also be hard to remember all the shortcuts.  So what I was thinking what might be a good idea is to create a right-click menu in Trados that you can use to run any number of scripts.  You can then save all your scripts in a separate location, edit the menu script to point to the scripts, and then use the menu instead of each individual script individually.

Creating a real-looking right-click menu is going to be quite a task, but one can create something that looks similar enough:

Custom right-click menu in Trados Studio with options like 'Find word', 'Copy fragment', 'Place tag', 'Open Notepad', and 'ExitApp'.

The menu is called by pressing Alt and right-clicking, or by pressing WinKey + W (though obviously you can edit those).  The menu usually pops up at the mouse pointer position, so if you use WinKey + W instead of Alt+ right-click, the menu may appear wherever your mouse pointer happens to be, instead of at the cursor position.

Pressing "ExitApp" closes the menu script entirely, pressing Escape (or pressing a button) only hides the menu (i.e. it "closes" the menu, but the menu script is actually still running).

With a real right-click menu, you can select options using the up/down keys, but with this menu, you can also move between the buttons using Tab/Shift+Tab.  If your button names have accelerators (i.e. characters preceded by & in the script), you can also select a button by pressing that character (in the example, I've use [&1] etc, so that pressing "1" on the keyboard will also run that script).  Pressing ENTER will obviously press the button that is currently selected.

The menu and some example scripts are here:
http://www.leuce.com/autoit/AHK%20alt%20right-click%20menu.zip

Your thoughts?  Or if you know of a program/script that does a similar thing, but much better, let me/us know!

Samuel



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[edited by: Trados AI at 4:03 AM (GMT 0) on 5 Mar 2024]
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  • Thanks for trying that ... I'm guilty of finding this and not trying it myself so I'm glad to see your feedback. I did have a play with this one which looks very pretty (you can change the skin very easily) but I'm not sure if it's overkill for this usecase:

    autohotkey.com/.../viewtopic.php

    I think your earlier suggestion about extending the AHK manager plugin to include a menu for the hotkeys is a good idea and I'll add this to our todo list in the appstore team. I reckon we could create a nice feature from this to support the organised scripts and automatically add them to the menu whenever a new script is added via the app.

    Won't be very soon as we have a lot on, including the Studio 2019 updates, but I will come back to this as I love the whole idea around AHK and would like to bring it to more users.

    Regards

    Paul

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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