delays

All sorts of things cause delay.

Macros. I have one for "everything", which is to say; any task I do more than a couple of times, gets scripted. I have many; a set of functions one could knock together with AutoIt et al, without too much trouble and some weeks to spare, maybe less, depending on delays. But Macros, as a rule, remove delays. Though in creating macros, we sometimes add them, intentionally..

Take two Explorer macros, "show hidden items", and "hide hidden items". Sometimes I need the former state, though prefer the latter, it's neater; so I have two macros, activated thus; Right Alt+H to hide, Right Alt+U to unhide, aka, "show". U is easier to get to with your Left thumb on the Right Alt, which in HotKeySpeak, is actually "Ctrl+Alt", but that's more information you don't need.

They simply do mouse clicks and keystrokes, open the Explorer folder options dialog, switch to the correct pane, and check/uncheck the checkbox to show/hide hidden items, close the dialog, job finished. I stave off the RSI this way, or at least, make the damage count for meaningful tasks, like writing here probably isn't.

I penned the pair circa '96, and noticed today, on my super-fast machine - Yes, I finally took the plunge, threading the tiny copper wire into those two pin holes in my Socket A, threw this Athlon XP 2400+ (Thanks Joker!) into overdrive - that these two macros were not fast. In fact, they were painfully slow. I click the M in the tray to investigate; Macro Express, affectionately known as "Mex".

It turns out I had three delays programmed into them. The first, to wait for the window to appear, the second for the correct tab to select and paint, and the third, for the checkbox to highlight before clicking the okay. 500ms + 750ms + 550ms; clearly I had these timed down to a ball hair, circa Windows98 + shoebox peecee.

I halved the values and toggled the hidden Explorer items. Obviously, twice as fast, yet no cues are missed; the macros function fine. I half them again and all is well, though of course, with quadruple velocity. And again, and again. AOK.

So I remove the delays, and Boom-Boom, both macros function perfectly. Of course, I don't actually see it happen, being faster-than-the-eye, and all. Hmmm..

100ms + 100ms + 100ms

Yeah, that's about right.

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org