The other day a thought crossed my mind. Could I setup the scripts I wrote to be triggered by keyboard shortcuts? After a little research it turns out yes this is very easy to do in Windows. But there are some limitations.
For this example I will use the text-to-voice script I made in the past. But in theory this could be used for any file or program on your computer.
Making a shortcut file
Make your shortcut by right clicking and then click “Create shortcut” or “Send To > Desktop” on the script or whatever you want your keyboard shortcut to point to.
The main limitation is the need for a shortcut file and if you move the shortcut it sometimes breaks the keyboard shortcut. The best that I can tell it has to stay in the user profile. Maybe this is a security thing.
Setup the keyboard shortcut keys
Now you right click the new shortcut and go to properties.
In here I set the shortcut key to Ctrl+Alt+T by clicking in the shortcut key field and pushing T on the keyboard.
For a script you will have to change the target field to something that will work. For PowerShell it’s something like:
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -file "C:\Users\username\Desktop\Scripts\TextToVoice.ps1"Test your keyboard shortcuts
Now give your shortcut key a test and see if it works.
If it did not work it might be because of the location your file or shortcut is in. I noticed for me when I was testing that things did not work in the root of the C: drive but inside my user profile folders they seem to work fine.
Enjoy!
It’s simple to setup and I find it very handy at times. I hope it helps you too!
