Here’s a very simple guide for StrokesPlus freeware users. It shows how to make an easy mouse-gesture that runs a complex keyboard-shortcut. Having such a thing relieves a desktop PC user of the need to do contortionist hand-yoga on the keyboard.

Why is this guide needed? Because StrokesPlus documentation is good but very techie, and it seems impossible for search to find a good basic two-minute starter guide with a couple of clear examples. So here it such a guide.

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1. Open your StrokesPlus menu and go to Actions…

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2. In the StrokesPlus Actions | Global Actions section, choose an un-used mouse-gesture and simply modify it. Here I’ve modified the simple “Last Track” gesture that’s meant for media-players, so that it runs ALT + SHIFT + 4.

acSendKeys(“%+4”)

This mouse-gesture is then used in a Web browser, being invoked with a ‘right-click and drag’ with the mouse. The triggered command then sends my selection from the text of a news story or journal article to my ‘Save as eBook’ addon. (Note that the gesture needs to be in StrokesPlus’s ‘Global’ folder, not its ‘Internet Browsers’ folder, to work for me).

Having this mouse-gesture is especially useful with ‘Save as eBook’ (a great Instapaper replacement, able to grab more types of text and more private). Because it’s all too easy to hit the wrong item in the plain menu… and thus accidentally blank your ebook!

One can even add a command to wait three seconds, then have the ‘Save as eBook’s “OK” button automatically pressed to exit it…

acSendKeys(“%+4{DELAY 3000}{ENTER}”)

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3. In your selected StrokesPlus gesture, write your own command and change the comment. Press APPLY and then OK in that order. You’re done.

Test your gesture and see that it works.

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“Write your own command? How do you do that?”

Here are the basics of how to write your own command. I’ll use the gesture that works with my ‘Save as eBook’ addon as the example…

acSendKeys(“%+4”)

acSendKeys = do specific keyboard key-presses, in a specific order.

(“”) = always present, to neatly wrap up the keystrokes and commands.

% = the ALT key

+ = the SHIFT key

4 = the number 4 on the keyboard. (This could also be an a-z letter)

The other big keyboard strokes you’ll need for encapsulating keyboard shortcuts are:

^ = CTRL

{F_1} = F1. This can run through to F_9 = F9. Note that the { } brackets are required. Here’s an example that uses them…

acSendKeys(“%^{F_1}”)

This will run the keyboard shortcut ALT + CTRL + F1 when you make your chosen mouse-gesture.

Similarly, such brackets are also required for…

{DELAY 3000} = wait three seconds

{ENTER} = press the ENTER key

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A few mores useful working examples:

@c = WINDOWS LEFT KEY + c   (to open a running Copernic Desktop from tasbar, window maximised) (note the lower-case requirement when using the @ shortcut for the WinKey)

acSendKeys(“@c{DELAY 100}@{DOWN}”) = as above, but now we add a slight delay then do Windows LEFT KEY + Down Arrow (this minimizes the newly opened and maximised Copernic Desktop Search window, such that the empty search bar is centred in the user’s desktop view)

The above works on the assumption that after typing and running the search, the Copernic window is always then manually maximised, then after consulting the search results it is sent to the Taskbar in maximised form.

Regrettably I had no success whatsoever in enabling any of the scrolling commands. It’s supposed to be able do gestures that trigger scrolling. But not one of of them work. The best I could get was Page Up and Down…

acSendKeys(“{PGUP}”)
acSendKeys(“{PGDN}”)

While these works they do not autofocus on whatever window chances to be under the cursor. For that you need to add the following to the Global Lua tab…

function sp_before_action(gnm, gsx, gsy, gex, gey, gwd)
     acActivateWindow(nil, gsx, gsy)
end

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That’s it. Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.

Update: Carrot2 changed the layout and a new script is now needed. here’s the fix.

I made a Stylus CSS to have the Carrot2 Clustering Search Engine give its results as a five-column layout showing about 32 results. This is suited to a desktop PC with a widescreen 24″ monitor at 1920px.

On each search result block, I’ve increased the title in size a little, the snippet has been shrunk a little, the URL turned from difficult-to-read grey to a more usual dark green, and the results numbering has been effectively removed by turning it white. Numbering runs down each column and then starts again at the top of the next.

In the straight one-column version, all results come in on a single page and there are usually between 32 and 75 of them. There is thus no pagination (“next page”) in my columnar version. In my version if you wish to see the lower hidden results, right-click your Stylus icon, switch off the style and scroll down. No re-load is needed.

However the lack of pagination in my style may actually be found quite useful. Because it pushes the user toward testing the Carrot2 auto-clustering feature, in order to try to surface stuff that may be down in the inaccessible follow-on results.

Here’s the code. I’ve double-checked that WordPress isn’t blanking some bits of it. To install simply go to Carrot2, then left-click on your icon for the Stylus browser addon and click “Write style for…”.

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/* ==== CARROT2 - Multi-Columns v.01 ==== */
element.style {
}
div.document div.url {
overflow: hidden;
color: #3a7730;
font-size: 110%;
}
div.snippet, div.document div.url {
font-size: 97%;
}
div.document .rank {
color: #ffffff;
}
a {
font-size: 113%;
}
#documents {
column-count: 5;
}


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It will probably work with other CSS style injectors.

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Incidentally, DuckDuckGo has a bang! for flicking searches from Duck-to-Carrot: !carrot This can also be embedded in a menu in DuckDuckGo by using the UserScript ‘DuckDuckMenu’ and adding:

http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search?source=web&view=folders&skin=fancy-compact&query={searchTerms}&results=30&algorithm=lingo&EToolsDocumentSource.country=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.language=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.customerId=&EToolsDocumentSource.safeSearch=false

Update, January 2020: now superseded, please see this solution instead.

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Within the last 48 hours or so the GoogleMonkeyR UserScript has stopped columnising Google Search results, due to a wholesale revamp of the Google page code. There appears to be no immediate fix, though doubtless one will emerge via greasyfork.org in time. Turn the script off, for now, if applying the suggested fixes below.

The working fallback I found is the Stylish script at Userstyles.org Google Search in columns for the Stylus browser add-on.

This gives you a working two-column layout on results from Google.com and Google Books. You’ll need to manually add https://www.google.co.uk/search? or whatever your national Google is, via the ‘Add’ botton found in Stylus | ‘Google Search in columns’. Google News remains unaffected, it seems, whatever you add. I’m talking about the real Google News, not the ersatz Google News that the clueless masses see.

To get three columns, which is a suitable layout for widescreen desktop PC, you need to open the drop-down on the install page and manually input the number “3” before install.

For a cleaner column look you’ll then also want to clean off all the unwanted fluff that has newly re-appeared (maps, videos, instant answers, suggestions and other distractions) by selecting it with UBlock Origin…

If using the ‘Google Hit Hider by Domain’ blocking script, careful you don’t clean off your hidden results divs, while thinking they’re just blank spaces in the results.

You’ll also want to stay clear of blocking anything with “nth-of-type(1)” or you’ll blank the Google News results. “nth-of-type(2)” doesn’t seem to cause the same problem.

To block distracting cover thumbnails, on results from the new Google Books, pick one with the uBlock element picker, then block them all by manually pasting in…

##*.th

Here’s a look at the newly added items in my block-list in UBlock Origin, on top of my existing ones for Google…

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The results, in combination with the two-column Stylish script (three columns is also possible, but has to be set at install – see note above)…

Search.

Books.

News (no effect)

Scholar is not affected by these fixes.

Some minimal scrolling is still needed with two-columns, which is wasn’t before. Still, as I said above, this is only a temporary stopgap until a GoogleMonkeyR fix.