AutoHotkey program used for PC and Mac?

[Tigerlily]

Hi folks,

I just talked to a business owner who said their former employee implemented a AutoHotkey program across PC and Mac - they currently use it for everyday operations. I didn't question it at first since I'm pretty green to AHK, but through my research the closest thing to an AHK build to support Mac was Poly's IronAHK, which was never finished.

Is this even possible, or should I call BS? Maybe the biz owner is just not super familiar with how AHK works.. but perhaps not.

Is there some way to use AHK on Mac via Parallels, or some app like that?

Is there a way that someone, with enough expert knowledge of AHK, could perhaps build this custom to support Mac usage in limited circumstances?

Would they have to create a new custom AHK source code to accomplish this, or would they be able to get away with programming it solely with AHK v1.1+ / v2 code?

Much appreciate your response. And yes, I know this sort of question has been asked a million times, but I think this is perhaps a different inquiry than many others post..

Thanks in advance.

[SOTE]

Because AutoHotkey is open source and under the controversial GPL, there are probably some unknown versions that are used privately and not released to the public. Where open source projects are under the more business friendly MIT license, they can release their code to the public, and can choose whether or not to open source the modified code. Under the MIT license, whatever part of the code they want to keep private, they can. Under GPL, they can't. Remember that if you release modified source code (the AutoHotkey source, not your personal script) to the public, under the GPL, then you have to give the public access to view and modify it too. And various businesses will likely choose not to do so, which means the public never gets the benefit or will have no knowledge of any radical modifications.

However, the advantage of the GPL is that it helps open source code survive it's creators and developers, if or when they lose interest or have some life altering event that doesn't allow them to continue. Anybody can pick up the torch and continue adding changes to the original source code or create a new fork. Where if a company or developer keeps their code secret, then the code "dies" with them or if they lose interest. Nobody will know about any interesting changes they did.

With that typed, it means there are probably some very interesting undisclosed versions of AutoHotkey that nobody knows about, being used privately. There is no telling what a or a group of gifted programmer(s) might have done.

[gregster]

Perhaps they just used the WINE emulator on the Mac - I am not sure how well this will work today, but I remember people using AHK with Wine/Linux already many years ago (and not everything worked)... but there is this, for example: https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/50460-my-ahk-app-running-on-a-mac-pic-inside/

[Tigerlily]

So I found out that they somehow used LUA with AHK to implement this on their Mac computers. I looked around for some posts about this, but couldn't find much other than people arguing about whether AHK should natively support LUA integration.

I'm pretty new to programming, but being an experienced beginner at AHK, would I be able to learn how to integrate AHK via LUA for MAC relatively easily, or does this seem like a daunting task?