AutoHotkey Community

Hello,

I have wrote a gui that I plan on having do some things with clocks and timers. Once I hit a button, a time is put into a text field. How can I have a loop that is ALWAYS executing while the gui is alive that could say, decrement a second (I don't need help with decrementing a second, only the placement of said loop). I tried placing after the full code of the gui and nothing happened. Any help would be much appreciated.

not complete but might point you in the right direction for the help file

I think of GUI interfaces as static, meaning non-moving.
GUI interfaces are also economical, they are drawn and done without wasting time.
They only change based on something happening. In fact most of the scripts I have seen there is a Return instruction just after the Gui, show command.

Given those ideas, why not use something that is also economical: SetTimer. It can be set to call a subroutine as often as you like. It can increment a variable and finish, then wait until the next settimer calls it.
You can use this to show "elapsed time".

If you need something that allows a value to be placed in a field based on when the gui was shown an when you pushed the button consider reading and storing a copy of the variables A_Now or A_TickCount. Just after showing the GUI read and store one of those variables, later when you push a button read the variable again. If you subtract the stored value from the last, you get how long between GUI-shown and button-pushed.

If you want to use the SetTimer command to start a subroutine, place the SetTimer command after GUI, show and before Return.

If all you want to do is change text on something without killing the GUI the command specifically (for text and edit fields) is