AutoHotkey Community

[Whelkman]

Our administrative staff dreaded every month's end because, for whatever reason, our accounting system was built without a method to apply late fees. Every month, two or three people toiled for hours on end manually inserting transactions. The following week wrought a second wave of dread when irate clients called regarding their $10,000 late fees--mistakes which are bound to happen when modifying hundreds of accounts by hand and the people doing so become too burned out to check their work. There had to be a better way.

Friday, June 30 saw the production release of an aging robot written in AutoHotkey. It reads a CSV of account numbers and fees to apply and clicks through the accounting system's web interface. A frustrating experience that once took several people hours was reduced to thirty minutes--and running on the weakest scrap Pentium III Windows 2000 computer we had on hand to boot. Three people audited the results, and the robot was an unqualified success.

I went from merely investigating AutoHotkey based on hype (mostly from Lifehacker), to realizing it was capable of the task I had in mind, to learning necessary syntax, and to producing a proof in concept in about six hours. AutoHotkey's included documentation is among the best I've ever seen, and I have never witnessed a better use of the Windows help system.

Today I came across a laptop with a peculiar bug: Windows' context (right-click) menu would not go away. It turns out the the context key had completely flaked out and triggered some 60-100 times per second. It's an older laptop, so replacing the keyboard would require eBay and probably $50+. Ugh. For a lark, I decided to install AutoHotkey and instruct it to ignore the context key (AppsKey::return), and, what do you know, it worked! I'm sure that keyboard will fail completely eventually, but, today, it has a new life.

I normally detest anything resembling programming, but AutoHotkey has rekindled my interest. From now on, every time I run into a mundane, "stupid" technological obstacle, I'll ask myself, "How can AutoHotkey fix this?"

AutoHotkey is awesome. Thanks to all that make it happen.

[Krogdor]

Hehe, wrong forum!

But yes, I agree, AutoHotKey is truly amazing :3 Whenever I look at some other programming language all that comes to mind is... nothing. But an AutoHotKey script is almost comprehensible even without extensive reading, and even though I have only been using it for a couple of weeks now I already use it so much that I have become almost reliant on it x_x

Thanks so much to Chris and everyone else who has helped to make AHK awesome

[IN2ITive]

I feel the same way...although I have seen "knowing about AHK" being detrimental to my work time

Since learning about AHK I have been able to modify the existing Expose-Clone utility here to fit our needs as a monitoring station of our virtual machines, create an automatic application build unistall/installer, a server event log viewer without being logged onto a server (in my company we were only allowed 2 simultaneous connections to a server at one; this script allows you to view the event logs without being connected), a CVS scheduled updater for our virtual machines, and a message listener/router (part working).

I found AHK by chance and can say that it is a site that I goto everyday now. It has made my work life a lot easier.

Thanks to Sean and all posters who make this a very productive community!