AutoHotkey Community

Make it easier on us non-coders!

Welcome!

If you have an idea of how to visualize the multitude of functions possible in AutoHotkey, please share it. IOW, tell us how would you like to work instead of writing the code.

Something like Macro Express has. But free and four hundred percent better. I like the fact you can export a macro into an EXE. + build simple menus. Maybe it can be sort of like Visual Basic (for the menu building) & Macro express (for the if/and statements/fuctions, etc) I don't know.

I'd love to see a VB style IDE for AHK but, unfortunately, I doubt many others here would be interested...

That would awesome. But I believe an easier way of doing this would be to take advantage of MacroExpress' already complete software package. Maybe somebody could quickly code a converter that converts MacroExpress' macro code into AHK's? Could be a useful project definitely.

macroexpress.com i believe.

It would be way too much work for an open source-non-profit language.

Some work has already been done on creating an "IDE" for AutoHotkey, there is ofcourse SmartGUI, there are Scintilla/HiEdit based projects for editing code, there is Lil Builder.

This is all far from a complete IDE/debugger, and certainly not close to anything like Macro Express/Automise in terms of "easy-script-composition-for-absolute-non-techies".

It can be done, but I guess that would be the absolute last "step" in creating a working IDE for AutoHotkey.

BTW: I absolutely detest Macro Express exactly because of their "simpleton" interface (and because it's bulky and expensive). You are better off using VBScript if you have to use Macro Express.

On the other hand, I love Automator/AppleScript for MacIntosh, which also has a "simpleton" interface (but it's free, and very good).

AutoHotkey doesn't need an IDE. The commands are so simple and compact you can easily visualise the looks of Guis as you write them. Moreover scripting in ahk is so much more productive than say C or Java as you can debug live.

The only hurdle in my opinion is the initial problem of remembering command names and parameters. Thankfully though everything is very well documented.