I’m not a big fan of Photoshop’s rigid UI, so I made a floating toolbar which makes common tools and functions more accessible.
It’s admittedly tailored to fit my particular needs, but it might be useful for others as well, even if just showing a way to do things like this. The base idea could work with pretty much any software.

How it works

The toolbar is a separate application made with AutoIt. It floats above Photoshop, moves with it and sends different keyboard shortcuts when a button is pushed.
It can send a series of keyboard events as well, so anything in the menus can be executed in theory. (For example: “Alt-F, Down, Down, Enter")

Unfortunately in Photoshop one shortcut can be associated with more than one tool. So in order to make the toolbar behave consistently I had to reassign quite a few of the tool shortcuts: one tool - one shortcut.
I also assigned new (otherwise not used) hotkeys to functions which didn’t have one.

Installation

First download the zip containing all necessary files:
My Photoshop Toolbar v1.0

Unzip it to a directory where you want to run the application from.

The *.jsx files are Photoshop export scripts, made by James Deschenes.
They provide a one click export of the currently selected layer(-group) to PNG/TGA, using its name. It’s recommended to install the scripts before loading up the keyboard settings: Just copy them to Presets/Scripts/ in your Photoshop directory.

“MyKeyboardShortcuts” is a workspace file containing the modified hotkey layout.
Copy it to your Settings/Workspaces directory and load it after starting Photoshop.

Usage

Just run the MyPSToolbar.exe after Photoshop has started. The toolbar quits if PS is not running. It can also be closed by right clicking on the small blue/white “A” icon in the systray.

You can pass two parameters to the exe file: two numbers will define the toolbar’s position
relative to the Photoshop window.

For example:
MyPSToolbar.exe 300 10
This shifts the toolbar 300 to the right and 10 down.

Troubleshooting

- The toolbar starts off screen. / I want the toolbar to start elsewhere.
See the customization section bellow.

- Some buttons don’t do anything.
It’s probably because the workspace with the special shortcut layout is not used or the TGA/PNG export scripts were not installed.

- The toolbar disappears when PS opens a child window like the Open File dialog.
It’s annoying but at this point I don’t know how to fix it.

Credits

The icons used are from Adobe Photoshop and Corel PaintShopPro, some of them was made by me.

The SelectedTextureExport scripts were made by James Deschenes (www.cablecow.com).

A big thanks goes for the guys on the AutoIt forum, especially to Melba23 for all the help.