Another Authotkey user here! 😃 On my machine, Mehul's solution with the 1ms delay takes noticeably longer to actually insert some text. I found the following solution which inserts it in a less "chunky" manner. Adjust the 1ms till it works for your setup :) ; This worked ::dx::{Sleep 1}DevExpress ; For longer hotstrings, I needed more ::azerty::{Sleep 60}DevExpress With 250ms pretty much any length of hotstring expanded correctly. I answered this Stackoverflow question with details from this issue. The same bug might have been present in an earlier version of VSCode: microsoft/vscode#1934 They make mention of this commit fixing it. Unfortunately it's a rather large commit :( microsoft/vscode@a1bd50f Commit msg: "Fixes #1168: Read synchronously from textarea" The problem has to do with the backspace remapping. Take the following autohotkey hotstring: ::tada::🎉 This will make typing "tada" followed by one of the "EndingChars" (space, tab, comma, dot, ...) expand to the 🎉 emoji. What you see visually happening on the screen is that Autohotkey does this by first sending a backspace to the editor 4 times (length of hotstring "tada") and then inserts the replacement text (🎉) What happens when this (pretty fantastic) extension is active is that the first x characters get deleted then the replacement text gets inserted and then the remaining (hotstring length - x) characters get deleted. But because the cursor is now at the end of the replacement text... which gets chewed on 😃 I'll have to learn how to debug the IDE itself or always add a {Sleep 250} to my hotstrings...

So instead I have it open up Frink. If Frink is already open, it activates it. If it’s already active, it minimizes it. Much better UX.3

toggle_app(app, location) 
{
    if WinExist(app)   
    {
        if !WinActive(app)
        {
            WinActivate
        }
        else
        {
            WinMinimize
        }
  }
    else if location != ""
    {
        Run, %location%
    }
}

Launch_App2::toggle_app("Frink", "\Path\to\frink.jar")