How to Make Your Own Quick Note-Taking App With AutoHotkey
Are you seeking a light, ultra-quick, easy-to-access note-taking solution? Search online, and you’ll find countless suggestions for such apps. And yet, even the “lightest” ones are often clunky and may come with features you may personally consider useless.
So, let’s see how you could create your own ultra-light, blazing-fast, custom note-taking app using AutoHotkey. A simple, no-frills note-taking solution that will be able to pop on your screen instantly with a single key press.
Setting Up a Plan for Note Taking With AutoHotkey
Let’s begin by clearly stating our final goal and devising a simple plan for getting there.
For this project, we don’t need any fancy text formatting, support for templates, or other “advanced” features. Our goal?
And that’s all—no extra windows, dialogs, menus, or buttons.
Thankfully, such a project is easy to build with AutoHotkey, as we’ll see next. Feel free to follow even if you haven’t used AutoHotkey before. However, it might be best if you first checked ourquick AutoHotkey guide for beginners.
How to Install AutoHotkey
Since AutoHotkey is a third-party solution, to use it, you need to install it.
So, pay a visit toAutoHotkey’s official site, and click on the friendly greenDownloadbutton. Skip both the V1 (deprecated) and V2 (beta) versions, and choose toDownload Current Version. Then, install it on your computer.
You won’t be able to notice any changes afterward since AutoHotkey only works as a parser for AutoHotkey scripts. In other words, AutoHotkey doesn’t “do anything” on its own. Instead, it works as the platform on which the script we will craft next will run.
How to Make a New Script in AutoHotkey
Open your favorite file manager, likeWindows File Explorer, and point it to the directory where you want to create your new script. You can choose any directory from your desktop to your personal Documents folder.
The easiest way to create a new AutoHotkey script is by taking advantage of the new option available through the right-click context menu after installing AutoHotkey. Right-click on an empty spot of the file manager’s window, and from the menu that appears, chooseNew>AutoHotkey Script.
Since AutoHotkey scripts are actually plain text files, you could alternatively create a new text file and then rename it, changing its extension fromTXTtoAHK. The final result will be the same: you will have a new blank AutoHotkey script.
Fire up your favorite text or code editor and open the script there to edit it. For this article, we’ll be using Notepad++, but you can use any similar tool, like VS Code or Atom.
Of course, if you prefer keeping things simple, you can always use the good old Notepad that accompanies Windows.
Crafting a GUI in AutoHotkey
To simplify future customization of our script, let’s store two essential pieces of information in two variables.
It should look like this:
Usually, AutoHotkey is used for affecting other windows, as we saw on our article onhow to center any window on your screen with AutoHotkey, or for creating hotkeys, for which you can check our guide onmaking app-specific hotkeys with AutoHotkey.
However, in this scenario, we’ll rely a lot on AutoHotkey’s GUI creation capabilities, which many people forget about. AutoHotkey “taps into” Windows' own “window toolkit”. This enables the creation of GUIs with all the usual elements you’d expect to find in a “standard” OS window, from text fields and drop-down menus to buttons and scrollbars.
Thankfully, since we’re making a simple and “lite” note-taking app, the project won’t be complicated and, thus, relatively easy to craft. Our GUI will consist of only three elements:
We won’t even add a “Cancel” button since we’ll map that function to the Escape key on the keyboard and the action of closing the window.
Add the line below to your script - it basically “tells” AutoHotkey that the font in any element that follows should be “size 14” and “color 666666”.
Next, the following line:
Next, let’s change the font size to 12 and its color to 4444444 for any elements that come after that line.
Then, add a larger editable text box for the actual content of the note, map it to the Note variable, and pre-populate it with anything already in the clipboard.
Finally, add a button under the two text boxes and at the bottom of the app’s window, mapped to the script’s default OK function.
We’ve created a GUI, but we also need a window to display it.
For that, the following line “tells” AutoHotkey to create a window at coordinates 0, 0 (horizontal, vertical), with 560 pixels width and 735 pixels height, named “MUONotes”.
The full script up to now should look something like the following:
Making the Buttons Do Something in AutoHotkey
Our GUI is ready—you can check it out by double-clicking on your script.
As you will see, the main note’s area will be pre-populated with the clipboard’s contents. However, the app itself will be useless because we haven’t yet added support for saving anything.
Fix that by adding the following to your script:
Let’s disassemble that:
Sanitizing the Text in AutoHotkey
The “sanitization” function we mentioned above is the following:
To go through it line-by-line:
Making the Final Tweaks to Your Note-Taking App
Your note-taking script is ready to use, but if you try it out, you might see its window pop up and instantly disappear. That’s because you also need to “return” each function you defined in it.
So, place the word “return” (with no quotation marks) under:
However, if you try running your script now, you’ll see it still lingers in the Windows tray after using it. To have the app close and the script fully exit, add the following at the very end:
Finally, to have the app instantly run whenever you need it, create a shortcut for your script on your desktop. Then, right-click on it, chooseProperties, click in theShortcut keyfield, and hit your desired button combination.
Congratulations on Making Your First App in AutoHotkey
It might have initially sounded like a complicated project, but as we saw, creating a “lite” note-taking app was pretty straightforward.
All thanks to AutoHotkey’s human-friendly syntax and ability to take advantage of Windows' default GUI-related elements.
AutoHotkey lets you make custom Windows shortcuts, macros, and more! Here are some useful AutoHotkey scripts to get you started.
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