[HotKeyNet] Sending keystrokes from slave to master?

[Freddie]

I can't believe that after looking through pages and pages of Google results for HotKeyNet, FTL, etc. that I never once seen anything stating to put a script on the slave client. It might have been stated and I just missed it...

I'm sorry. I'm not sure what I can do to make it more clear. HotkeyNet's website says repeatedly that every instance of HotkeyNet has the same abilities. For example, the home page says that you can press a hotkey on any keyboard.

For years, I used to add a sentence like, "With HotkeyNet, every copy can do the same things," to nearly every forum post. I must have done this several hundred times.

The program doesn't distinguish instances of itself. They are all the same. You can load scripts on as many instances as you want.

The problem here is that users assume something that isn't true. I never told them this false thing. They simply assume it on their own. They assume that the server copy of HotkeyNet is a master and the client copies are slaves.

This assumption has always seemed bizarre to me because by definition, a client is a thing that sends commands and a server is a thing that carries out commands. Everybody knows this (or should know this) from web browsers, which are the most common examples of a client-server program. When you tell your browser which web page you want to see, it sends a command to the server. The server, not the client, is the slave.

In fact, "server" is almost a literal synonym for "slave." A slave is a person who is bound to service. "Client" is almost a synonym for "patron", i.e., master. But for some reason people imagine that "server" means "instance that sends commands." I really don't understand it.

But all of this is irrelevant in HotkeyNet's case. With HotkeyNet the client-server distinction only applies to the communications protocol. It has no effect on anything that the user can see. It has no effect on scripts or hotkeys.

I guess part of the problem is that WoW boxers usually think of their groups as consisting of a master and slaves, and they assume HotkeyNet must share this idea. But HotkeyNet has nothing in particular to do with WoW. It's a general purpose hotkey program.

This misunderstanding is one of HotkeyNet's worst problems because it makes people think the program is much less powerful than it really is. If they run four instances of HotkeyNet, they are ignoring three quarters of the program's potential power.

The way I've solved this problem with Mojo is to eliminate clients and servers. Mojo is peer-to-peer and every copy is identical in every way. People won't be able to assume that one instance is different from the others because the instances are indistinguishable.

Here's the revised example script and the slave client script I used to test (just in case this helps someone else):

Nice job!

It looks like you're pressing NumPad1 on both keyboards with your finger. If you want to reach back and forth like that, it's perfectly fine.

I myself use three keyboards when I multibox -- I'm really not criticizing this. I like using three keyboards.

But just so people know, if you want, you can set this up so you only have to press one keyboard. You would use <DoHotkey> on your main keyboard to trigger hotkeys on the other computers.

Thanks again for your help! I was getting fed up with searching, which is why I made a thread. It takes a lot of agony to get me to ask for help. I'm a big believer in Google, hehe. Now I can get back to the fun stuff.

You're welcome! Thanks for posting.