AutoHotkey Community

[jonny]

Toralf recently suggested a mini-"Tidy" script to clean up poorly structured AutoHotkey scripts. Before this can be done, though, a standard needs to be set down for syntax and style in AHK scripts. I'm starting a separate thread for this because I think that once it's developed it will be a useful resource in and of itself.

I understand that it might not be Chris' wish to have a set standard like this, so I'm stressing that it's unofficial.

I'd suggest that for the most fundamental style rules, we draw from the showcase scripts, since many have learned from example by them and it might be difficult to migrate to a different standard. As for how exactly this standard will be structured, I will maintain the list below as the thread develops, and it will only contain rules which have been firmly agreed upon by a majority. It can also contain "non-rules," which specify areas of style for which no standard can or should be made.

• No standards have been set yet.

[jonny]

I didn't want to make any of my own suggestions in that first post since I like to have one "master post" in threads like this to maintain something that resembles order. So anyway, here are my first suggestions:

1. All statements within blocks (e.g. loops and if statements) should be indented by either one tab or four spaces.
   
2. All flow-control functions that are the direct result of a conditional statement should be indented by either one tab or four spaces.
   
3. Semi-colon comments should have at least one space between the comment flag and the text of the comment.
   
4. Same-line comments should be avoided when the comments are more than 1 1/2 times larger than their corresponding functions.

More to come as I think of them! Here are some areas I'm still trying to reach a decision on:

• The case (upper, lower, mixed) of functions, their parameters, and variables.
  
• Spaces between parameters.
  
• Whitespace.
  
• Whether a comma should be between a function and it's first parameter or not.
  
• Variable names.
  
• When using /* */ is acceptable.

Note that for some of these, I'm considering "non-rules" too.

[Chris]

[Titan]

Good guidelines for newbies but I think people can layout their scripts however, just as long it as does the job right
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RegExReplace("irc.freenode.net/autohotkey", "^(?=(.(?=[\0-r\[]*((?<=\.).))))(?:[c-\x73]{2,8}(\S))+((2)|\b[^\2-]){2}\D++$", "$u3$1$3$4$2")

[jonny]

The options sound like a very good idea and I will try to do that; however, it would still be nice if we laid down some kind of standard that's generally accepted but that certainly doesn't have to be conformed to. With such a standard, we'd then have a basis for more "formal" scripts like ones in the showcase or in a future wiki.

[BoBo]

[BoBo]

BoBo wrote:

[jonny]

These are the key words here:

[jonny]

Does anyone else have style suggestions? If not for anything else, they could at least be used as defaults for the formatter.

[Rajat]

i started work on it long ago (here)... but scrapped what i had done bcoz nobody showed interest!
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[jonny]

Is there anything left that you could post? (If so, make a new thread) I had considered doing it in a different language, especially because of the current lack of regex in AHK, but if you already have something it couldn't be too hard to work from there.

As for the html highlighting, I think that will definitely have to be done in a different language. There's too much to be done for syntax highlighting to do it with AHK's limited string capabilities.

[Invalid User]

Just my two cents, I ALWAYS have spaces between my commas, always have the command and first param seperated by a comma, comments are never more than one whitespace from the end of the command line, there is never a space between the semi-colon and the comment, All the contents of a block is 1 tab in(which in my case just so happens to be 4 spaces). Oh yeah I tend not to let my comments run off the width of the editor, in that case I always start a new line. and always keep a empty line above and below comments that are about a process in gerneral rather than same line comments that talk about the command the commented line line is on. Sample

[Rajat]

@jonny
i might be having some of them... but they're old and i don't remember what i did then... but i'll post when i'll get to my PC.

@IU
very good practices! ... i also do much the same. i also write cmds like FileAppend and not fileappend. makes it more readable.
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[Invalid User]

Might you give a short example of this file appending practice?
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my lame sig

[Rajat (cookie trouble)]

sorry for not being clear, i just meant that i capitalize the first letter of words in cmds...like IfEqual or StringReplace etc.