10 Year Anniversary

[jballi]

I just realized today that this year is the 10 year anniversary of AutoHotkey v1.0.48.05, the last release of AutoHotkey from Chris. Although the migration to the AutoHotkey version from Lexikos and continued effort by him to maintain it has ended up well, most people don't know or have forgotten the turmoil and rigmarole that went on in the few years immediately following Chris' departure.

Much of the transition history can be found here:
https://www.autohotkey.com/foundation/history.html

The 10 year anniversary of a Lexikos version of AutoHotkey has come and gone. Sorry I missed it. The first release of a AutoHotkey version from Lexikos was July 18, 2008. At this point, Lexikos has been working on AutoHotkey for more than 3 years longer than Chris did.

Thanks to Chris for developing AutoHotkey and to Lexikos and many (many) others for keeping it going.

[guest3456]

congrats and thanks to all

[toralf]

Congrats, all your effort is highly appreciated

[swagfag]

At this point, Lexikos has been working on AutoHotkey for more than 3 years longer than Chris did.

what does this even mean? can u just give me the dates? this sentence is unintelligible to me.

2011: Lexikos started developing AutoHotkey v2-alpha.

holy shit, v2 is 8 years old

[jballi]

Chris: 2003-2009. ~6 years.
Lexikos: 2008-2019+. ~11 years and counting.

I guess it's closer to 5 years longer although there is a 1 year overlap.

[swagfag]

right, so >3 years longer than Chris had as of 2019, now I get it
the numbers just didnt make sense as it were

[blue83]

Thank you for creating Autohotkey

[joedf]

Coolio!
@jballi do you think there's anything more I could add between 2003 and 2009?
I know brief things like the whole autoit v2 fork for hotkeys, then some disagreements, then autoit became closed source.
but not sure what really happened otherwise, it was before my time ahah

[garry]

Autohotkey, best I've found in internet ...

https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/58864-my-status-and-website-changes/ ;- Chris 20101010
https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/76331-the-future-of-autohotkeycom/ ;- Chris 20120126
https://autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=466 ;- Tidbit 20161010
20131031 :
Mid- 2009 - Chris lost interest in AutoHotkey. Lexikos began developing what was then a fork of AutoHotkey named AutoHotkey_L (AHK_L).
2009-2012 - AHK_L development flourished with many longtime desired functionality, such as Unicode, COM, arrays/objects and many others; some of which implemented by fellow community members.
It had become the de-facto official AHK version.
2012 - Chris decided to transfer ownership of the domain and the data to polyethene (formerly known as Titan).
Mid-2012 - polyethene decided to "restore" the old 2009 AutoHotkey as the official version for still not understood reasons,
removing all references to AHK_L in the main autohotkey.com site and performing questionable moderator actions.
Immediate backslash ensued, and eventually a petition to finally make AutoHotkey_L the official version was made.
2011 - Lexikos started developing AutoHotkey v2-alpha.
Late 2012 - AutoHotkey_L became the official branch, now renamed to just "AutoHotkey" or AHK 1.1 to be specific. Lexikos officially became the AHK maintainer. Download links were updated accordingly.
Late 2012 - autohotkey.net was hacked and all files were lost.
2013 - polyethene became completely missing, meanwhile the old forum (which had gone through two upgrades, phpBB2->phpBB3->IP Boards) riddled in bugs [and suffered under Polyethene's censorship.]
Oct 2013 - tank stepped in, tired of the forum bugs, and created this site. The community flooded over here (including all prominent members such as Lexikos, SKAN, tidbit or many others),
basically leaving autohotkey.com in a state of stagnation.
Administration of ahkscript.org was defined to work in a cooperative way, with many people with varying power levels (instead of just forum moderators and site plenipotentiary).

[joedf]

Thanks, garry! Forgot about some of those.
I'll read through it and do some updates.

[jballi]

I came along after Chris released the first versions of AutoHotkey so I missed the early stuff. You can find a little more of the history here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoHotkey

One of the biggest differences between AutoHotkey and AutoIt IMHO is the GUI interface. Chris put in a lot of time and effort in the early years creating (and Lexikos and a few others supported and then significantly enhanced) a ready-to-use GUI platform. Although it is far from perfect, AutoHotkey is an excellent tool for quickly creating and using a GUI. I'm sure that many developers use AutoHotkey to rapidly prototype a GUI interface for other projects. Because of the speed and efficiency of AutoHotkey, there are a quite a few developers that use AutoHotkey from start to finish. There are many programs out there developed entirely with AutoHotkey.

[SOTE]

I came along after Chris released the first versions of AutoHotkey so I missed the early stuff. You can find a little more of the history here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoHotkey

One of the biggest differences between AutoHotkey and AutoIt IMHO is the GUI interface. Chris put in a lot of time and effort in the early years creating (and Lexikos and a few others supported and then significantly enhanced) a ready-to-use GUI platform. Although it is far from perfect, AutoHotkey is an excellent tool for quickly creating and using a GUI. I'm sure that many developers use AutoHotkey to rapidly prototype a GUI interface for other projects. Because of the speed and efficiency of AutoHotkey, there are a quite a few developers that use AutoHotkey from start to finish. There are many programs out there developed entirely with AutoHotkey.

I agree with this point about the GUI interface. It was one of the reasons why I choose AutoHotkey over AutoIt. Quicker and easier to use and understand GUI code for scripts. AutoIt GUI code was messier. And not just the GUI, but this holds true for a lot of the syntax. I mean how much easier and convenient can you get than "Loop"? By the way, the Rust programming language (C family) uses the syntax of "Loop" as well.

In addition, did not like AutoIt's Basic-ish syntax. Admittedly, which type of syntax a programmer likes is about preference and bias. However, I thought the decision by Chris to stay with a more C family syntax has proven to be a better one. People, often AutoIt people, have thrown stones at AutoHotkey's syntax but by it at least being in the C family it's more helpful to AutoHotkey users. The C family of programming languages is huge. JavaScript, Java, C#, Objective C, Swift, Dart, PHP, Go, Rust, etc... It's a much easier jump from AutoHotkey to those other C family languages, then it is if using AutoIt and stuck on Basic syntax. Not to mention that by AutoHotkey being open source, we got the forks of AutoHotkey_L and AutoHotkey_H. AutoHotkey_H encourages compiling, which pushes users to look at the C/C++ source code. There is also the use of MCode in AutoHotkey, which again encourages finding and studying C/C++ functions.

[SOTE]

20131031 :
Mid- 2009 - Chris lost interest in AutoHotkey. Lexikos began developing what was then a fork of AutoHotkey named AutoHotkey_L (AHK_L).
2009-2012 - AHK_L development flourished with many longtime desired functionality, such as Unicode, COM, arrays/objects and many others; some of which implemented by fellow community members.
It had become the de-facto official AHK version.
2012 - Chris decided to transfer ownership of the domain and the data to polyethene (formerly known as Titan).
Mid-2012 - polyethene decided to "restore" the old 2009 AutoHotkey as the official version for still not understood reasons,
removing all references to AHK_L in the main autohotkey.com site and performing questionable moderator actions.
Immediate backslash ensued, and eventually a petition to finally make AutoHotkey_L the official version was made.
2011 - Lexikos started developing AutoHotkey v2-alpha.
Late 2012 - AutoHotkey_L became the official branch, now renamed to just "AutoHotkey" or AHK 1.1 to be specific. Lexikos officially became the AHK maintainer. Download links were updated accordingly.
Late 2012 - autohotkey.net was hacked and all files were lost.
2013 - polyethene became completely missing, meanwhile the old forum (which had gone through two upgrades, phpBB2->phpBB3->IP Boards) riddled in bugs [and suffered under Polyethene's censorship.]
Oct 2013 - tank stepped in, tired of the forum bugs, and created this site. The community flooded over here (including all prominent members such as Lexikos, SKAN, tidbit or many others),
basically leaving autohotkey.com in a state of stagnation.
Administration of ahkscript.org was defined to work in a cooperative way, with many people with varying power levels (instead of just forum moderators and site plenipotentiary).

Somewhere in this story is Polyethene/Titan and IronAHK (based on C#). Very interestingly, it looks like that project started in late 2009 (https://github.com/Paris/IronAHK/releases). So possibly there was an issue/conflict there about which fork of AutoHotkey should be chosen. I find this sad, as having both IronAHK and AHK_L developed to their max potential would have been great for the community. People are still clamoring for a cross-platform version of AutoHotkey for other OSes (Linux, maxOS, and Android). That's just how well liked AutoHotkey is. Looks like IronAHK could have satisfied that demand.

Clearly multiple forks of AutoHotkey can co-exist, as we have AutoHotkey_L and AutoHotkey_H. We had AutoHotkey for Pocket PCs/WinCE (https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/24776-autohotkey-for-pocket-pcs-wince-smartphones/), but the problem is Microsoft failed us on that one. Microsoft has gotten their butts kicked in the mobile space. Though they do seem to be planning some things to make a comeback.