Many of my projects involve writing a program in my text editor (Textpad), copying it into the clipboard, and then pasting it into a statistical program like S-plus or Stata. I just found out through the Stata Text Editor FAQ about a new product, AutoIt, that can simplify this process. In the past, I had used a commercial product, QuicKeys, to automate some of my work, but have not used it recently. AutoIt is an Open Source program which means that the source code is open for others to modify or improve it.
In another weblog entry, I have discussed the GNU license, but have not seriously distinguished between GNU and Open Source. There is indeed a technical distinction, but both GNU and Open Source, but from a practical perspective both provide good alternatives to proprietary software.
I’ll investigate AutoIt when I have time and report back on the results.
You can find an earlier version of this page on my original website.