The key mappings are still a work in progress (please email me if you have any suggestions), but here they are:

To type grave marks (à, è, ì, ò, ù), hold down CapsLock and type the corresponding letter. To type them in uppercase (À, È, Ì, Ò, Ù), just hold down Shift as well.

To type acute marks (é, í, ó, ú), hold down the ’ key and type the corresponding letter. To type them in uppercase (è, ì, ò, ù), hold down the Shift key as well.

To type the very rare circonflesso (î/Î), hit CapsLock+c to type the lowercase, and Shift+CapsLock+c to type the uppercase.

You can also type special symbols like €, «», ºª. You can see the key mappings for these in the quick reference guide below.

Please note that in order to allow the CapsLock to be used, the program modifies how your CapsLock  and ” keys work a little. When the program is running, you need to hit your CapsLock key twice to turn CapsLock on or off, and the ” key twice to type “.

Changes:

1. To toggle CapsLock on and off, simply double-tap the CapsLock key.

2. Due to very popular demand, there is now an option to install the program and have it startup automatically.

While these are the only two changes, this is a pretty major update, mostly due to the new startup feature. I’ve tested extensively on my own computer, but I would not be surprised if these changes introduce some new bugs for some users (most probably those with non-standard keyboard layouts).

This newest version of the programs now allows users to quickly enable/disable the program’s functionality by simply left-clicking on the program icon in the system tray. When the program is disabled, the CapsLock key’s normal functionality is restored and cannot be used to type accents.

Download

Spanish Accents CapsLock.exe

German Accents CapsLock.exe

Changes:

1.Shift+CapsLock+letter to type capital accent marks.

You can type capital accent marks now by typing Shift+CapsLock+letter. The old way (Tab+letter) still works though, so if that’s working for you, you can keep using that method.

2.Turn on CapsLock by right-clicking the program icon.

Last version, I disabled the CapsLock key to prevent CapsLock from being accidentally turned on when typing accents. Several users emailed me about this, so now you can turn on/off CapsLock by right-clicking the program icon. However, the actual CapsLock key will remain disabled. I think this is a good compromise so that users don’t accidentally activate CapsLock, but those who need to use the CapsLock key for some reason can still occasionally use it without too much hassle. However, if for some reason you need a hotkey to toggle CapsLock quickly, please email me or leave a comment below, and I’ll write you a custom version.

3. Type € (the euro sign) by typing either CapsLock+4 or Shift+CapsLock+4.

4. Help File for Spanish version fixed.

The old Spanish version’s help file was accidentally replaced by the German version.

Some pretty big changes:

1. Merged US and UK versions. This means that it doesn’t matter what kind of keyboard you have any more.

2. The Caps Lock key will be disabled. This is to prevent accidentally turning on CapsLock when typing accents.

3. Instead of a hotkey, the help file can now be triggered by right clicking the tray icon and clicking “Help.”

4. Significantly improved compatability with other programs with hotkeys involving the Tab key.

5. Admin mode shouldn’t be necessary any more, but this is based on a limited sample of users.

6. To minimize confusion, I’m not linking to the source code here. You can look for it on the “Downloads” page.

7. Some minor stuff like no more underscores in the names and smaller file sizes due to compression.

Grab them while they’re hot!

Will this program work for other typing test websites?
Well, the actual program itself should work for nearly everything because it simply types the characters one-by-one, just like a human would do it. However, the part where you copy the text using Firebug will likely not work for other typing test websites.

Instructions

1. Run this program.
2. Install the excellent “Firebug” extension on your Firefox.
3. Enter a race on typeracer.com.
4. Hit F12 to open up the Firebug window.
5. Make sure the Firebug window is open to the “HTML” tab.
6. Hit Ctrl+Shift+K to type in the search box.
7. Search for a phrase in the text like “farcical aquatic ceremony.” Hit Enter.
8. Click on the highlighted phrase that Firebug found.
9. Hit Ctrl+C to copy the text to your clipboard.
10. Click in the input box on typeracer.
11. Hit Ctrl+Shift+U.
12. Type the first word in the text (in green and underlined).
13. Hit Ctrl+V to paste the rest of the text.
14. Hit Enter.
15. Either get disqualified outright or asked to take a special typing test with a CAPTCHA to verify that you didn’t cheat.

Background: I created this in about five minutes (it’s four lines of code) after I was defeated by a friend. I could have created a much more elaborate program, one that does even more of the work for you, and to try to get around the CAPTCHA test with OCR, but I didn’t really see the point; I’m not so vain as to want to get my name in the list of high scores, and I wasn’t even sure if the CAPTCHA could be beaten anyway. If you want to do this, create your own damn program. This was only for a one-time prank to blow away my friend with a blistering 270 WPM score with 100% accuracy.

Screenshots

Proof that I was able to cheat:

Future Development

As with all my programs, please contact me to report a bug or suggest a new feature. This is especially important for this program because I consider this program to be “feature-complete” and probably won’t be working on it anymore unless someone emails me with a interesting suggestion.

Download

TypeRacer Trickster.exe

Update 1/3/11: There is now no separate UK version since I figured out how to workaround the problem. Click here to learn more and to download the programs.

Update 10/24/10: Found that for certain applications, like Microsoft Office, you need to run my program in administrative mode. This only affects the UK versions because I had to use a different method of intercepting keystrokes for the UK keyboard layout. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do on my end to fix this problem; blame Microsoft for heavy-handed security “features.”

After several reports of users having some trouble using Spanish_Accents_CapsLock with UK keyboard layouts, I finally figured out the problem. The solution isn’t perfect though, as it requires disabling the normal CapsLock functionality (not a big deal), and also uses a “keyboard hook”, which may be falsely detected as a virus because many keyloggers use them. Hence, I will be publishing two versions, a normal one and a UK one, of all subsequent updates to this program and the German version.

Note: If you have a UK-layout keyboard, please use this UK version.

After updating the Spanish accents version, I figured I’d do the same for the German version. Basically, this increases compatibility for people with keyboard layouts otehr than the standard US QWERTY keyboard. For example, if you have a French AZERTY keyboard, you may have had trouble using the old version.

What you need to know is that instead of using the ` key to type capital accents like Ä or Ü, you now hold down the Tabs key instead. Also, if you ever forget the key combos, you can press Shift+Tab to see a quick refrence guide.

I’d originally wrote Spanish_Accents_CapsLock for people with standard, US, QWERTY keyboard layouts, but people with alternative keyboard layouts like the French AZERTY keyboard have been having problems because for them, the ` key is actually quite important to type in French.

Therefore, I rewrote the half of the program that dealt with typing capital accented letters like Á or É. It now uses “Tab” instead of the ` key so it should be universally compatible with all keyboard layouts (what keyboard doesn’t have “tab”?). I’ve also added an internal help file that you can access by pressing Shift+Tab. It will popup a quick reference guide of all the various key combinations.

This script is perfect for spray-and-pray, button-mashing type of games. Also, if you ever wondered how someone got that impossibly high score on games like these, it’s not because they have some kind of supernatural button-pressing power (or in the case of the last game, prodigious amounts of patience and free time), it’s because they cheated. After all, even “Master Takahashi”, whose entire claim to fame rests on how well he can button mash, could only reach 16 shots per second at his peak; this script does over 60 per second on my computer.

When I chose to call this “super simple”, I really meant it. This is not meant for more complicated games like WoW (ex. this fishing bot) or Starcraft II. If you’re looking for these kinds of highly specific scripts, check the AutoHotkey forums or better yet, learn to write one yourself. I was so lazy that I didn’t include a GUI or even make a custom logo!

Anyway, without any further ado (oh wait…darn!), here’s the download links.

Download

Super Simple Button Masher.exe

Super Simple Button Masher.ahk

Notes:

Microsoft, for security purposes, doesn’t let the script work properly in explorer and IE windows. To get around this, run the program in administrator mode, or better yet, get a better browser.

Some of you guys have asked me to make a Mandarin Chinese version of Spanish_Accents_CapsLock. I’d be happy to, but someone’s already made a really clever little script for that. I really like his implementation, which is very specific to how hanyu pinyin and Chinese works. You just add the tone number right after the word. So you could type “zhong1guo2 shi4 shi4jie4 zui4 hao3 de guo2jia1” and you get “zhōngguó shì shìjiè zuì hǎo de guójiā”. To Chinese speakers this is very intuitive and much better than trying to come up with 4 different hotkeys for each vowel to account for each tone in Chinese.

The only thing that gives me pause in recommending it is that it’s an online solution. While the author’s kept the site running for years, I’m always wary of sites suddenly disappearing from the web. The author provides a download to the PHP script but in order to use it, you’d have to upload it to a server, but most people don’t have access to a spare server. For these people, I’ve made an offline version which CAN be run locally using any old browser. You can find the zip file here. Extract it and open “index.html” in your browser.

All credit goes to to Konrad M. Lawson, who wrote the app, and those who helped him: James Dew, Helmer Aslaksen, C.P. Sobelman, and Phyllis Zhang.

Download

pause_mpc.exe (program)

pause_mpc.ahk (source code)

Update (11/21/2010): Improved version of the script. See details below.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of ebooks in PDF format so it wasn’t long before I noticed that when you copy text in Adobe Reader (or any other kind of PDF reader like Foxit Reader), it copies the hard returns so if you copy more than one line of text, each line of text is treated like its own paragraph.

The Problem

This is what it looks like in Adobe Reader.

This is what happens when you copy that text and paste it into Microsoft Word.

Still good, right? But what if I want to change the font size?

Here I changed the font size of the first two lines to 8-pt. Now you should see the problem quite clearly; in its infinite wisdom, Adobe Reader inserts hard returns instead of soft returns. In other words, Adobe Reader is essentially pressing “Enter/Return” after every line instead of automatically “word wrapping” the text to fit the window size. If this sounds absurdly idiotic, that’s because it is. At first I didn’t know that was the problem until I found this guy’s blog post in a Google search. To give you an idea of how basic “word wrap” is, Notepad has it.

I know I’m not the only one who’s had this problem, and someone even wrote a Word macro. I haven’t tried the macro but it only works with Microsoft Word and it seems overly complicated (it uses well over 100 lines of code and requires a detailed step-by-step installation and usage guide; my script just works out of the box and only uses five nine lines of code (I added support for other PDF readers) [The latest version uses quite a few lines of code, but the vast majority of it is just to add some “nice-to-have” features, especially the automatic quote appending].

The Fix

Download

PDF Copy-Paster.exe (program)

Program Notes

This script strips out all hard returns out of any copied text. Simply keep the program running and it will automatically take out all the hard returns in the background. The program only activates for PDF readers. Currently the program recognizes Adobe Reader (both the standalone program and the browser plugin versions), Foxit Reader, and Sumatra PDF as PDF readers. If your favorite PDF reader isn’t on here, shoot me a quick email and I’ll add it for you.

[Note: The latest version (5/2/11) will close this popup for you automatically] Note that if you press ctrl+c twice quickly, Adobe Reader may pop up a message saying “There was an error while copying to the Clipboard. An internal error occured.” This is likely because Adobe Reader tried to modify the clipboard contents while they were being modified by the script (removing the hard returns). You do not need to copy the text again; everything should work fine.

Update (5/2/11)

I finally made a breakthrough and identified why sometimes the script would stop working and have to be restarted. Turns out it’s an issue with Windows, not anything to do with my code. Anyway, I’ve included a workaround as well as some new features such as an option to automatically add quotes to your copied selections (right click on tray icon to enable) and the ability to left-click on the tray icon to disable or enable the program. The program’s been significantly changed, but most of it is under the hood. The script should now have absolutely no bugs. Of course, if you think you’ve found me, please contact me.

Update (11/21/2010)

I’ve been using this program a lot while writing some big research papers, so I returned to the script to make toggling it more elegant. Now, just press Ctrl+Shift+D to toggle whether the script is active or not. The script’s icon will reflect this change. You no longer need the helper program for this functionality.

Update (9/2/2010)

Helper Program

I wrote this little script for a friend who sometimes wanted to retain the hard returns and sometimes didn’t. It’s not exactly elegant, but it works. Press Ctrl+Shift+d to toggle PDF Copy-Paster. If it’s already running, it will be closed while if it isn’t running, this script will run it.

A few notes

1. This only works for the compiled version of PDF Copy-Paster (the .exe version). Although I am providing a source code version (.ahk), this version also only works with the compiled version of PDF Copy-Paster.

2. This companion script needs to be placed in the same directory as PDF Copy-Paster.exe.

3. I was too lazy to make an icon for this, so it uses the default AHK icons.

Helper Program Download

PDF Copy-Paster Toggler.exe (program)

PDF Copy-Paster Toggler.ahk (source code)

Hold down Caps Lock and press c to type ©.

Hold down Caps Lock and press r to type ®.

Hold down Caps Lock and press t to type ™.

If you have any suggestions on more common commercial characters for me to include, please let me know. Even if it’s something completely specific to you, chances are I’ll write a custom version for you to use!

Download

Commercial_CapsLock.exe (program)

Commercial_CapsLock.ahk (source code)

This app couldn’t be simpler. It’s two lines of code, and all you need to do is scroll your mousewheel up or down while holding down the Win key (the one with the Windows logo on it) to adjust the volume.

Download

Win+Scroll Volume Control.exe (program)

Win+Scroll Volume Control.ahk (source code)