AutoHotkey Community

I just ran across this old thread and thought the poll and the posts are both quite interesting, so I'm reviving it. For myself, I was a 1. I'd been dabbling in Windows tweaks since Windows 98 and was a top contributor on the TweakXP.com forum, so I knew all about system settings, registry edits, services, and such; but had never actually programmed anything myself until I heard about AHK in a thread there and realised that rather than try to make Windows do what I wanted, I could write my own programs. Three years later I'm not sorry I switched forums. However, it has become obvious to me that those with a programming background learn AHK much more rapidly than I did, especially the advanced topics. DllCall still blows my mind and I see some new AHK users pick it up like second nature.

I'm interested to see more of the newbies vote in the poll and find out what kind of audience AHK is bringing in today. To be honest, I'm surprised at how advanced many AHK users are, so perhaps programmers are more likely to look for a good scripting language than script kiddies. I would expect the majority of new users are just looking for a game macro so they can cheat their way into the hall of fame, but maybe that's not the case.

I am a 2. Much like jaco I've been playing around with Windows tweaks since Windows 95 and became fairly proficient with writing batch files. I also used to put together webpages so I was familiar with HTML/JavaScript. I've gone on to work in tech support/QA roles which required some knowledge of C/C++/Visual Basic/Java but nothing substantive in the way of programming.

I really didn't come into AHK but for any other reason than I was very annoyed with my own inefficiency at my place of work. Having long been a miner of Gizmo's Tech Support Alert for information I took his macro recommendation for Authotkey and gave it a try. The learning curve has been hell but the nice thing is that you can start building scripts from the most rudimentary steps and improve upon them over time as your knowledge of the commands and functions increases (many of the scripts in the forum also make it much easier to learn how to use the program as well).

My most recent performance reviews at work showed that I was working at a much higher level of efficiency than my co-workers so I'm now getting a shot to work on an office deployment of AHK (tightening budgets like efficiency). It's a nice step up but it also requires me to learn even more about AHK so I can make more things work better and faster (evidenced by my recent struggles with IE & COM).

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Try Quick Search for Autohotkey or see the tutorial for newbies.

First.

AHK is a pretty good scripting engine in all... it's a scripting engine that actually has logic, lol.

I put 3 because I have done some html, C++, actionscript and ruby (maybe a few more) but never as in depth as AutoHotkey. I like the simplicity and the comunity here is great.

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aboutscript ⍟ apps ⍟ scripts
Any code ⇈ above ⇈ requires AutoHotkey_L to run

Second.

It's a reply with no logic, lol.

I'm really glad this thread got a phoenix down, I am a 2. I stumbled on AHK while searching for a really good automation solution for my job. Before that I have been going to school for video game design, and have always dabbled in game mods/edits but for the most part have never had any training or education of scripting.
I started using AHK as a means to an end to replace a bunch of scripts I built in a program called KeyText, which is very buggy and slow. It is a ninekey multiclip that allows you to store strings to a key on the ninekey and retrieve it like a paste function.
See here:
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic41768.html

But aside from the awesome potential of AHK, it really is the community that makes it. I was very shocked to find my posts being replied to quickly, and relevantly. It is that that makes me very sure that as I move forward in my career and pick up other languages, that I will always keep AHK in my toolbelt.

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"lol, i made this thing, but it didn't work... so I read the forums and now it does!"

Ha....well for my very first post on this forum........

I would be a solid #1. I did some punch card crap in college mid-70's.....but have relied on MS to shepard me through starting with a 8088 chip.

I have been playing poker online for the past coupla years and have used AHK scripts that others have written. I landed here today to try and GET STARTED because my wife needs me. She is an MD that is struggling with electronic medical records.

I hooked her up with an AHK script (I did not write) that functions as a Quick Text command....again, one I use for poker daily as I have several frequent rants I NEED to post in the chat window like "You FRIGGIN' MORON. How can you call with That!!" or "You are such a DONKEY". Well, you get the idea

Anyway...I am going to try to learn a bit about what is under the hood now. Probably not quick enough for my wife though......

Option for 4 is the best match for me in the poll. I taught graduate classes in universities (used 5 different languages), but I am no programmer.

I'm number 2. I used to do a bit of batch and explored in it on a forum (I can't remember which), until I wanted to code for game purposes such as botting and such. But I fell in love with AHK too quickly and dropped my first intentions. I went building tools that I feel would benefit a lot of people on other forums. I do not post much on the forum at all because almost everything I need can be found by searching. For now, I do not really know much about dllCall, so what I do is I use functions and tutorials provided by others. I love AHK - it is actually a humanly language which doesn't take much to understand. As for now, I am stuck on making a IE control in AHK which allows me to control the web controls on the site loaded in the IE control (be it a hidden or shown window).

#1 fits best for me. Not a long time (~4 years) ago I still thought programmers would write their programs directly in binary

I got my own computer, installed a bunch of software to personalize it (mostly garbage ). When going through a software RSS feed half a year later, I found AHK, dowloaded it and tried it in the evening, just as any other software I downladed. But AHK was different. It changed my life

I attempted to write 2 apps in AHK, which didn't get finished (because I recognized they were rather useless) and then I started writing some libs. To be honest, I hardly use any of them myself.
While attempting to prog a 3rd app, I started to learn C# and converted the app (see 1st link in my sig).

At the moment I'm considering to look into either Java or C++ or another scripting language such as Python / Ruby / Perl. But maybe I delay this because in school we deal with HTML / CSS / JavaScript / PHP the next 1.5 years.

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