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I remember doing the "use PostMessage to send a WM_CHAR" trick as part of program I made to auto-draw in a FaceBook drawing app.

It would read a pixel value from a file, then "click" in the FaceBook app's color textfield, send 7 delete messages to remove the #000000 color, type in the new color value, then "click" at an X/Y position. It did it 10 times a second.

It worked great until I accidentally focused another app while it was running: and the 70 delete-messages-per-second got sent to Microsoft Outlook.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on as screenfuls of emails evaporated before my eyes.




In old Japanese internet that kind of bitmap-to-click tools were called “dot-tre” or “dot tracer” after the name of an app in mid 2000s


Well, basically the same story but with Auto Hotkey scripts!


Can get messy real quick!

I have:

  F9::
  Reload
  Return
in all my AutoHotKey scripts, so hitting F9 will cause the script to reload and thereby stop anything running. Also handy when doing edits and you want to reload to test.


Hopefully it wasn't a shift+delete message!

;-)




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