AutoHotkey Run-or-Raise

It is a common practice for some to use a Quake-style terminal. For those who have never played the game: it’s a single terminal window which is hidden by default and is toggled with the grave accent key. Those who like the behaviour use a terminal emulator program like Tilda on Linux or ConEmu on Windows.

Sometimes you might want the same behaviour for the utilities that do not support Quake-style windows by themselves. Luckily, you can still achieve this with a simple AutoHotkey script I’ve come up with.

RunOrRaise(class, run)
{
    if WinActive(class) {
        WinMinimize, %class%
    }
    else if WinExist(class) {
        WinActivate, %class%
    }
    else {
        Run, %run%
    }
}
; run PowerShell on Win + Z
#z::RunOrRaise("ahk_exe powershell.exe", "powershell -NoLogo")

The first parameter is the AHK window class, and the second one is the command to be run if the window doesn’t exist yet (usually the path to the program).

If you aren’t familiar with AutoHotkey yet, I strongly recommend you to check it out, it’s a lifesaver for those who are still running Windows for whatever reason: this program allows scripting system actions as complex as tiling window management, for instance.