I do a lot of reading and note making at the same time I have my source text on one screen and notepad on the other, it's a pain to have to keep going to the mouse to scroll the reading window down. Is there a way I can assign a shortcut on the keyboard to scroll the reading window while my typing window is active? Say like I'm typing in notepad, but pressing shift+pageDown would scroll the Web page in Chrome on the other screen. It's this possible to achieve? Either through Windows settings, a 3rd party program or a script I could write myself? I'm using Windows 10 Thanks
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Take a look at AutoHotKey. It should allow your to create a sequence that switches focus to notepad, scrolls, changes focus back to chrome.– ClaytonCommented Jan 15, 2018 at 20:27
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You will probably need to use keystrokes for the "scroll" like CursorDown or PageDown.– ClaytonCommented Jan 16, 2018 at 17:03
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2 Answers
Unfortunately there is no way to scroll an inactive window. Windows can only perform actions on one (and only one) active window.
By clicking your mouse on the webpage window, you make that the active window, before scrolling the text down. Your notepad window becomes inactive during that time, until you click on it again.
However: Alt-Tab (win95-win8.1, so probably on win10 too) can be used to cycle through open (though inactive) windows to make them active on release of the Alt-Tab button. With only two open windows Alt-Tab, PgDn, Alt-Tab would be a somewhat workable keyboard alternative for your mouse actions.
I see no solutions involving scripts or programs to accomplish this. It will mean investigating all open windows on the desktop and intervening with some of the basic window handling and keyboard behaviour of Windows. Seems like a lot of work. Maybe some expert will prove me wrong.
Another approach: If you could somehow find a online-notepad to do your writing within the browser, than that would be only one active window with different tabs. I am thinking of a vertical split screen browser window with the webpage on the left and the notepad page on the right and tabs above. Downside: you have to copy your online writings back to your PC.
There is a Scroll Inactive Window option in the Settings app, under Devices>Mouse It doesn't seem to work with touchpads though, only a separate mouse. It's not exactly what you're looking for but perhaps you could keep the mouse hovering over chrome while typing in notepad, and any scroll would scroll chrome.
