Question

The AutoHotkey command Hotkey allows for the creation of dynamic hotkeys at runtime, but its syntax and documentation seems to limit it to built-in or existing labels/subroutines, which makes it much less useful:

Hotkey, KeyName [, Label, Options]

Is there a way to get it to work like regular, hard-coded hotkeys? For example:

#z::MsgBox foobar        ; Typical, hard-coded hotkey pops up a message-box

Hotkey, z, MsgBox foobar ; Nope; complains about missing label “MsgBox foobar”

It looks like it might be possible due to the following line from the manual, however it is not clear how it would work:

Label – Both normal labels and hotkey/hotstring labels can be used.

Answer 1

Doing exactly what you want isn’t possible in AutoHotkey. This is the closest way I can think of.

Call this file Hotkeys.ahk, and put it in My Documents/AutoHotkey/Lib. Alternatively make a folder called Lib, and put it in the same directory as your main script.

Hotkeys := {}

Hotkey(hk, fun, p*) {
    global hotkeys
    hotkeys[hk] := {}
    hotkeys[hk].fun := fun
    hotkeys[hk].p := p
    Hotkey, %hk%, HandleHotkey
}

HandleHotkey:
hotkeys[A_ThisHotkey].fun(hotkeys[A_ThisHotkey].p*)
return

Here’s an example script that you could use it with.

Hotkey("e", "msgbox", "foobar")

MsgBox(msg) {
    msgbox % msg
}

#Include <Hotkeys>

The first parameter is the hotkey, the second is the function to call, and everything after that is passed to the function.