HoeKey - Exactly what I needed

So I listen to music at work a bunch via headphones (here in Fargo, we've got cubes, not individual offices).  I use my laptop as my "fluff" machine - that is, i listen to music, read mail, do office stuff, write up bugs, web surf (gasp!), etc from it. 

Naturally, this doesn't have the "media" keys of the recently awful MS keyboards.  So the common scenario is that a person comes over to talk to me and i have to find media player, restore it, hit pause, then take off my headphones, then turn to talk to the person.

What i wanted was a global "pause" button.

It turns out that somebody has made a tiny (12kb) program that lets you bind arbitrary key sequences (context-free, it seems) to arbitrary actions.  This thing fits the bill exactly, and is available from https://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~tsr22/apps/hoekey.htm.  It has stuff built-in to send messages to whatever app, so i can bind windowskey-P to send the play/pause command to WMP.  Life is good.

As an aside, the default config includes "windowskey-4" as a command which..turns the currently selected window to half alpha-transparency.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2005
  Great find, I just installed it and added the ability to pause my preffered media player to WinKey-P.
  
  I'm sure I'll find many more uses for it in the near future.
  
  I love how light on resources it is, only 184k of ram used!
• Anonymous
  November 01, 2005
  I should also add there are many neat utilities that this guy has on his site but one that I feel almost anybody would love to have is purrint, which intercepts the PrntScrn key and pops up a window that lets you choose between saving the screenshot to a file (bmp, gif or jpg), printing it or copying it to the clipboard. And it works with Alt-PrntScrn too!
  
  http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~tsr22/apps/#purrint
• Anonymous
  June 18, 2009
  PingBack from http://thestoragebench.info/story.php?id=3433