Useful post that will have mostly practical usage, diary mode with my thoughts and regular content will return soon, I want to get used to writing posts more frequently, but happy with one per week currently already, better than nothing for months for sure.
So let’s get to that trick…
I probably won’t open America with this and it’s not a hidden knowledge, but many people might just never even think about such simple little things that might save you a bit of clicks and decrease chances of you forgetting something. I’ll post some more later too for sure, but for now let’s start with “longest” one.
Pretty ancient trick, that uses .bat scripts, which I won’t obviously explain all the tech details behind here to fill my post with keywords and irrelevant water-text, there is always google for that. Tl;dr those are batch files that exist since one and only DOS that we used in my boomer times and back then that was a very important file format, but it is still around and still useful for example for what we are going to do now. Files are pretty simple and straight forward – it’s just a list of command that we want Windows to perform, pretty much the way you would put them in command line, but whole bunch of them in one go and launched in one click. There are many uses, but what I am using it for is to open a bunch of apps and websites that I need to have opened for my stream. I’ll just drop the text of my file for example and explain how to make yours:
@ECHO OFF
start “Chatterino” “E:\chatterino\chatterino.exe”
start “Chrome” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome_proxy.exe” –profile-directory=Default –app-id=<id>
start “Chrome” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome_proxy.exe” –profile-directory=Default –app-id=<id>
start “Firefox” “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” “https://twitter.com/home”
start /d “C:\Program Files (x86)\obs-studio\bin\64bit” obs64.exe
start “IntroFighters” “C:\Program Files\IntroFighters_2-1\IntroFighters.exe”
start “Foobar” “E:\foobar\foobar2000.exe”
echo|set /p=https://www.twitch.tv/comradenerdy|clip
So you will need @Echo Off to turn off the display of commands results and only have them being executed. Start is our main command that executes .exe files that we show it, but how to find what to show to it? Find the shortcut of the app you want to execute, right click on it, click “Properties”, find “Target” line there and copy everything from there the way you see it in my file, name of the app in “” is not necessary, but won’t hurt. You can see some special cases like with Chrome for example – those paths actually open some specific pages for you, so I have my main dashboard window and my popout chat in the same time, to get the line to use go to your Chrome, open the page you need, press menu button top right, pick “More tools”, “Create Shortcut” and you have a shortcut on your desktop you can work with like with ones before, copy the destination and then delete them. OBS launching goes a bit different way, because it didn’t want to launch like everything else and I went for alternative way, showing the path to directory with “start /d” and telling to launch obs64.exe from there, I’m not proficient with that stuff to explain, but it works so whatever. Very last line just puts my stream URL in my clipboard so I just paste it in my Twitter window that is also opened by that file and prepare my “going live” tweet, it goes as last command, because as you can see it uses “echo” again and needs it enabled, while rest – disabled. All that you just put in Notepad file and save as a .bat file with whatever name you want, supalauncha.bat like in my case, next time you launch that file it should open everything you put there. Some apps like OBS in my case might be tricky to use that way, but magical google usually helps.
Not exactly some insane magic, but it helps me to prepare everything I need for the stream in two clicks without forgetting anything. Technically can even put it on a timer (i might cover one thing with a timed launch in some later post too), so you have everything up and running like 10 minutes before you go live for example, but I it’s just 2 clicks anyway so it’s easy enough for me and sometimes I start earlier, sometimes later etc, so I rather do it manually.
Also I’m down for some interesting optimization and automation methods if you have anything to share you can always drop it in my Discord.