When I was in college, our online class registration process for each semester was very crude<p>When the time of year came, you'd be put into a group. Groups would be staggered across a series of days so as not to overwhelm the system. Very early on your group's morning (like 5am I think?), the floodgates would open and it was a mad (online) dash to grab slots so that you could hopefully get good times (avoiding 8am's, etc, or at least getting the credits you needed!). This all happened through a web portal, and in a matter of minutes you could miss your chance for some of the more popular classes. It was like trying to buy a PS5.<p>To go more quickly, you could type in an exact course number instead of browsing through the listings. So people would look up the numbers for the courses they wanted ahead of time (as well as for some backups, in case one or two of them filled up).<p>Well, I learned about AutoHotKey from another student. I hardcoded each of my F-keys to type in the course IDs on my list so I could fill them out rapidly, and was fairly successful getting the classes I wanted :)
The title is a bit confusing. It should says “programs that have saved Hacker News users 100+ hours”. I thought it was going to be about programs that people like dang at Y Combinator use in running Hacker News.
Note that Spectacle for macOS is no longer being maintained.<p><a href="https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#important-note" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#important-note</a><p>A common alternative mentioned is Rectangle.<p><a href="https://rectangleapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rectangleapp.com/</a>
For me it's (sikulix)[<a href="http://sikulix.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sikulix.com/</a>]<p>An underappreciated amalgamation of java robot, opencv and Jython has literally automated away thousands of inane man hours for me and some clients.
Surprised to see PowerTools but not ShareX. Originally a screenshotitng tool that is now somewhat of a more advanced Powertools. For instance, if I'm putting together product documentation I can take a screenshot of a specific window/region, save it to my hard drive, upload the resulting file to S3/B2/FTP, and get the resulting link copied to my clipboard using a single keyboard shortcut. One of the features I use often is the ability to grab a region of my screen and use OCR to convert it into copy/pastable text.
If you work with web applications repetitively in your work, a browser scripting platform like Selenium can be super powerful and Selenium is easy to work with in Python.
it's interesting that linux/unices is not listed because it is in my opinion the best place to automate repetitive tasks. now it may not be GUI intuituive