AutoHotkey Community

[Boskoop]

There are a few threads about tutorials and how to help newbies to learn AHK (i.e. this one ) The AHK-help contains an excellent tutorial, Veovis has started to write one in the Wiki , Thalon posted another one in German language and I'm sure there are much more I'm not aware of.

Reading that I wondered how the target group of these tutorials- the newbies- might look like. Therefore this poll.

I myself fit best in category 3. Years ago I had a friend who was a very good C-programmer. Always interested in learning new useless skills I got him to teach me the basics of C. At the end I managed to write a tool that converted Fahrenheit in Celsius (and vice versa) all on my own . I forgot everything about C since- but knowing some basic programming concepts (like loops, if-else, variables and functions) helped a lot when I later needed some VBA-applications and VB-scripts. And then I found Autohotkey...

The starting point with VBA, VB and later with AHK was always a problem I decided to solve by writing a tool on my own. So I rarely finished reading tutorials or books. Instead I started programming, relying heavily on the documentation and on help/ code snippets from the net. AHK is ideal for this approach as it's help file supplies working code examples for all commands. And the forum does the rest.

I'm curious about other reports.

Boskoop

[BoBo]

The second vote was from me.

[Jon]

I can't remember - it was almost 3 years ago I started using Autohotkey

It was either 1,2 , or 3

I think I'll go for 2

[peejay]

Somewhere between 3 and 4, and on my way to becoming a 5. Not in AHK though
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[jonny]

A professional programmer in AHK? I'd be very interested in knowing what corporations have switched to AutoHotkey for their software development.

[PhiLho]

No, a professional programmer using AutoHotkey...

Note that beside the easing of daily tasks, I used AutoHotkey to automate the generation of help files: checking out the files from Perforce, moving the files from the network to the local computer while filtering them (HTML cleaning with regexes, eliminating some useless image files), generating JavaHelp files and zipping everything in a jar file (using 7-Zip), running the indexer for some programs, zipping and archiving the original files.
I wrote that with AHK instead of Perl (which is more common here...) because I master the former, I would have spend much more time to do all this in Perl. Plus I can make a nice progress bar...

On the unpaid side, but semi-professional, I made a script to walk a list of translations for Zen Cart (e-commerce shop in PHP) and extract relevant constants to compare and see if the translation is up-to-date. I might publish this script someday, it can be educational at worse, useful for somebody else at best (once adapted, of course). It is surprisingly fast!
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vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

[jonny]

I was responding to this:

[Jaytech]

@ jonny:
LOL... well. I work for a company that, for the past 5 months, has payed me to do nothing but program in AHK for them. I, of course, shouldn't disclose the name of the company (though they are fairly large). I've been automating order processing proceedures so that we can cut back on the amount of man hours we put towards it. Right now, we estamate that AHK and my scripts are saving the company 80+ man hours a day.

I know what you're thinking Chris, "where's my cut?". Well, as soon as I get mine (which ain't happening), you'll get yours. These guys are tighter that a pressure hose gasket. I get my normal hourly for "processing orders", but I'm really a full time programer getting paid jack.

But enough of my venting. Just thought you'd like to know there's at least one "professional" AHK programmer out there.

[jonny]

[Hexadecimator]

#4: Been programming in several other languages for 5 years.

I may stick with AHK for awhile though, especially once I learn the basics for using functions in dlls. I was actually about to write a program like AHK (though in C# instead of C, and lacking basically everything that makes this language useful), but this is far better than I could have accomplished.

The automation of windows APIs was excellently done. The only lacking features are the form designers you get with the .net IDE, and some particularly useful aspects of object-oriented programming, like the ability to have multiple instances of a class. But this is a scripting language, and throwing classes and namespaces into the mix would take away what makes this uniqiue.

The best part of all is this supportive community, where you can post entire applications in the forums, instead of just code snippets. This makes AHK an excellent language to write something in if you think other people might want to use it.



And as for professional AHK programmers, I can see small companies relying almost entirely on AHK for their internal functions, though no companies will sell stuff written with it.

[BoBo]

[corrupt]

[Thalon]

I'm writing software in AHK for a company and get paid for it (I hope , I just started...). It hasn't that much code now (1900 today), but it will get much bigger and is for commercial useage. Their main applications are written in PHP and Java, but AHK is getting more and more...

On the other side I write some tools for games-communities (between a few lines and 10.000 lines (I know line-counts do not say too much)).
We are also using some of my tools in our company.

I've voted 4):
I learned to programm under Win32 with AHK, but I had some programming experiences before and wrote a display-driver at school. I got the basics of about 10 languages there.

Thalon
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[daonlyfreez]

I started with Basic, long-long time ago...

Then mid-nineties I became a professional content designer, so I learned HTML/JavaScript, later on CSS/XML/DHTML, tho I'm no expert on the latter whatsoever, and web content has changed a lot since then (PHP/MySQL, Flash etcet.).

I never used 'real' programming languages, though I studied C/C++ and Java.

AppleScript and AutoIt were my first favorites, then some three years ago - I guess - I discovered AutoHotkey, and am still using it. It does all I need.

Been working for a Fortune Top 100 company (a company y'all know and love/hate, but I'm not going to tell, and no, it's not Microsoft ) for the last four years, and have created a load of in-house tools with AHK, that really speed up the average work of the average Joe's and Jane's around here (and my own, ofcourse).

One of the biggest advantages of AutoHotkey is that any bugs/changes/requests can be fixed/implemented in only a fraction of the time it would take to change something programmed in e.g. C/C++ or Java, so, especially the in-house tools, can be adapted to changing circumstances easily and fast, which is perhaps the greatest strength of AHK. Try to do that with a 3rd party full-blown app.

It may take some time to convince management of the usefulness of AHK, especially the Open Source thing freaks many out for some reason, but frankly you just need to convince them to allow you to sit at someone's desk for half an hour, check on what he/she is doing, and write a small script that speeds up some of their actions. Present that to management, and it will not take long to convince them to take a shot at it...

And, don't forget to mention that it's free, and the compiled scripts need not be published. To convince the sheep up-the-ladder, I implemented a system that checks the userid/hardware id/ip and doublechecks against an app on a server. Moreover, the scripts are per-user compiled with private keys, double (once in-script, and once for the encrypted compile), and all user settings are saved encrypted. So, no way an employee could take a script/app home and use it from there, or from anywhere else (one of the biggest fears of management if you build tools that access internal servers for example).

If you can demonstrate it's usefulness, I'm sure your boss will consider using AHK. (Just to let you know what you might face if you suggest using AHK at work, it took me quite some time to convince them, but that might be the company).

Now I will be changing to another company next month ( ) and will be pushing hard to consider using AHK there too.
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[Benjamin]

I'm in the second category.. I know some basic programming stuff, worked with some Pascal & Delphi (ghehe, first half year of an IT-study), and some PHP before, but always without any real prior knowledge and understanding, and just taking bits of existing code and such to create what I wanted.

So I do understand some of the basics, but far from an expert unfortunately