Create a mock WindowSpy-alternative for bundling with the exe-instance of lintalist to ease bundle title-matching

[Gewerd-Strauss]

Hello,

I was recommending this amazing program to a few friends and was helping them setting it up via the executable version, as neither of them has an instance of AutoHotkey installed on their systems. However, I just realised that using the TitleMatch-parameter of the bundles for hotswapping is a bit difficult to accomplish if you don't have a window spy installed.

Granted, you can see the window title when alt-tabbing through your programs, but you have no simple way of extracting a specific window's title from that beyond just remembering it and typing it down bit by bit. Which is kinda arduous and unnecessarily difficult.

As lintalist, to my knowledge only works with window titles, this could be as simple as creating a gui with a callback on the left mouse click to display the respective window's title, then right click to copy to clipboard. Or something similar. Lintalist doesn't require the more detailed bits of the window spy, as far as I am aware.

Sincerely,
~Gw

[lintalist]

Yes, Lintalist uses the Window titles, the problem with a "window spy/picker" is that the results look something like this:

path\to\index.php - vscode
*menu.ahk - notepad
Lintalist - Text Expander, Snippet manager, supporting searchable interactive texts to copy & paste text, run scripts, using easily exchangeable bundles - Mozilla Firefox
Report.docx - Microsoft Word
... etc

but in the TitleMatch you probably only want vscode, notepad, .php, - Mozila Firefox, .docx

So just inserting Report.docx - Microsoft Word won't do much good and would need to be edited, also taking into account the match criteria that are already there if you want to add multiple criteria. It isn't particularly hard to do but I doubt it is worth the effort to be honest.

A casual user may not even need it as they may only use the default bundle which has no criteria.

I'll leave it up as a suggestion, perhaps others would endorse it, if so who knows ;)

[Gewerd-Strauss]

Hmm, you are right, this is not the smartest implementation.

I would disagree with the unusefulness of it for casual users - what makes several bundles so powerful is to have different title conditions. This allows for more snippets of hotkeys without having to switch around bundles all the time.

In addition, hiding such an integral, but unintuitive part from those who use this without knowing ahk itself seems... odd. The titlematch criteria is mentioned in the documentation afaik, so why handicap that functionality for those who don't know how/where to get that title-match to be used?

As to an implementation, why not just create an actual mock windowspy? That'd be a simple always-on-top gui with autoupdating 'read-only' edit-field. Set a timer to update say every .5 seconds or so. Reasonably allows the user to copy the intended parts of the window title.

Depending on implementation, you could make this a button in the edit-bundle submenu, so users can immediate enter their newfound snippet.

However, this is just a simple idea.