AutoHotkey Community

[Titan]

[ahk_fan]

One of the reasons AHK is so brilliant and useful in Windows land is that windows was, by and large, designed to be used interactively and not automated. AHK fills a hole by allowing you to automate previously "unautomatable" things.

In Linux and most un*x's, automation and scripting is a core concept. You can accomplish anything you want at the command line, so there is less of a need for AHK.

If you are trying to automate a linux GUI program, you should probably dig a little deeper, chances are that GUI was just written to put a friendly face on a command line that will everything you want and more, if you learn it.

[majkinetor]

in console there is command "expect" that can be used for automatition.

I didn't hear so far for GUI automatition sw on Lin, and I doubt anything sw specific can compensate that.
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[koantum]

[koantum]

[Tarch]

Hi,
there is xautomation for example that can send mouse events and keyboard events. You have to combine various programs/languages/libraries I think to get something similar to AHK.
In any case usually GNU/Linux has an inferior need (compared to windows) for GUI automation usually there is an alternative programmatic way to do the things.

Bye!

[corrupt]

[Tarch]

I'm just curious...can you write what do you mean in a more detailed way please?

Bye!

[corrupt]

Not really. I thought I'd give about as much detail as 99% of Linux users normally do when they say that Linux is better at things like this. In other words, dodge the question... .

It's not that there's much missing in general but the ability to automate mouse clicks, keystrokes, read data from a text file in a strange format (usually one that's non-standard that has been generated by some proprietary application) then modify and feed that data into some other application, and most other general conversion/automation tasks are not usually practical, due to the amount of time required to program these tasks in many other languages.

[Tarch]

Ok,
now I better understand (I personally try to judge things as objectivest as possible...obviously I'm very far from perfection ... in any case if I prefer something I try to give motivations because I think to say that "something is better" because "is better" it has not so much sense imho)! Glueing some things you probably be able to do the things you do with AHK, obviously a programming language like AHK would simplify the way you do these things. What I meant in the previous post is only that windows is born primarily as a GUI oriented os whether all the *nix (in this case GNU/Linux) are born with a more command line oriented approach. If you see many program in GNU/Linux are command line tool with a GUI forntend to simplify the use wheter the largest part of the programs on windows are not or hardly separable from their GUI. So what I meant is that on GNU/Linux is probably easier to automate things because of the approach. I hope you understand better now! ^.^

Bye!

[koch]

[AutoGuest]

The only problem of having AHK in linux is that so many functions are specific to windows which would mean a complete rewrite for linux.

[koch]

[AutoGuest]

[Elevator_Hazard]

Well AHK was made with VC++ and is probably packed with windows-specific stuff like windows tries to do. I've had some limited success on using wine by saving a .ahk file and using wine to run the "convert .ahk to .exe" program and compiling then running that exe file with wine. I realized I used the ChooseColor() function I found on the forum in one specific script I tested... It was weird because wine was able to emulate that .dll within it. I forgot that the same program also used COM to embed an IE control so of course that didn't work. Also on linux I've not seen an ahk-like language and I've also been trying to step up to something bigger like C++ or Python... I've not had much luck with learning either of them.

I adore linux so much! I'm a fan of the philosophy behind open-source and the GNU license (the points 0-3 are great). I had a book on linux from someone my mom works with which talked about the beginning of linux. I find it wonderful that I can satisfy most all of my needs program-wise by using the built-in "Add/Remove Programs" feature of linux (ubuntu). Because I know its virus-free and I have the freedom to choose from well over 1000 open source programs of all sorts rivalling most pricey programs.

That's enough rambling from me.
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Changed siggy at request of ahklerner