Keysharp - the resurrection of IronAHK

[burque505]

@BoBo, thanks for the encouragement!
Regards,
burque505

[skribb]

Just wanted to post an update that @burque505 has been helping me test over the past couple of months. He is testing daily, finding bugs, and I am fixing them. We are trying to work as fast as we can to get an initial release out, but it's slow going. The good news is that while we are finding bugs, their fixes are small, and *most* of the program works as documented in the AHK V2 documentation (with about 50 caveats that I'll include with the release notes).

Hang tight while we get through this important phase.

really great news to hear as someone who's looking to make the jump to linux

[mfeemster]

Linux support is a long, long way off. And quite a bit of what AHK does will not be portable to Linux because it's very Windows specific. But hopefully the core functionality will translate.

On that note, @burque505 and myself are still going strong on testing and debugging. Almost every day and night, at least one of us is working on it.

We've found almost a hundred bugs, and probably have about that many left yet to discover. I estimate another 200-300 will be found after we release the first version for wider testing.

[SOTE]

Great news that you guys are still pressing forward and testing.

Linux support is a long, long way off. And quite a bit of what AHK does will not be portable to Linux because it's very Windows specific. But hopefully the core functionality will translate.

Would be great to see you guys team up with phil294 (@phil294) whenever ready, who has an AHK Classic to Linux project on GitHub, and stated he would like to help in regards to Linux.

[mfeemster]

Awesome, I was unaware of that. I'll make a note. We'll definitely need all of the help we can get with Linux. I most certainly will NOT be able to do it on my own.

Give us a few more months of testing on Windows before we release an alpha version for everyone else to test.

[tank]

i know it seems silly but many of ahk's functionalities can be reduced to bash in *nix. or Python packages that could be ported or called directly since python is built into

[skribb]

i know it seems silly but many of ahk's functionalities can be reduced to bash in *nix. or Python packages that could be ported or called directly since python is built into

based

[bloom11]

Hi , if there is any need for additionnal pair of eyes and hands , even if i'm potentially a bit less expert than @burque505 for the task in C#. I' m in fact a full time developper , i'm working mostly with C and Web dev( JS/ PHP/HTML ) , when neeeded i programme in VBA and python , and for my personnal project or time saving project a lot in ahk but i have no problem learning CSharp for the occasion just make a sign if needed it will be a pleasure

[burque505]

Hi, @bloom11 , thanks for your post and your willingness to help. (@mfeemster is doing an extensive rewrite at the moment, just FYI.)

If you have Visual Studio 2022 (I use the free Community Edition), you might try downloading the bitbucket repo and compiling it. There is no installer at the moment.
There also is no documentation yet, and some functionality (though not much) is different enough from AHK that it might be difficult to get started - and of course many things may change.

That said, though, you could try out guitest.ahk (keysharp/Keysharp.Tests/Code/Gui) and look at the code for tips (if you do that, please make sure that all the files in that directory are in the same directory you're testing from.
For now, personally I've been doing all my testing in keysharp\keysharp\bin\debug\net6.0-windows, since keysharp.exe is there).

There are also other code samples under Keysharp.Tests.

(BTW, my own C# skills are pretty basic - it wouldn't take you long to pass me up even starting from scratch. )

I for one would be very happy to see more people testing Keysharp - once again, thanks for your post!

Regards,
burque505

[mfeemster]

Just wanted to give an update. @burque505 and I are still working regularly on this. Of note is that we recently got InputHook() properly working, as well as some other functionality. I'll post more updates here as we get closer to an alpha test version for people to start looking at.

[mfeemster]

First update for 2023. We've got #HotIf and its variants working. I've also implemented some preliminary support for classes, but not sure if a full implementation will be included in the first alpha release.

Going to keep tying up loose ends and will post here when we've made more progress.

[mfeemster]

We've continued adding further class support, with the latest work being for supporting properties.

[ahk7]

Thanks for keeping us informed

[SOTE]

Going to keep tying up loose ends and will post here when we've made more progress.

Thanks for keeping us informed

Totally agree with that sentiment, the updates are good. Hoping Keysharp can go alpha sometime in the near future.

[robodesign]

Hello!

I just learned of this project. I was looking for a Linux AHK scripts interpreter.

I see this project is a continuation of IronAHK and is being written in C#. And you have plans in the future for Linux support.

My questions are:
Will it have the same syntax as AHK v1.1 or v2 .... or its own?
What is the purpose of this project?

My apologies if these have been asked already.

Best regards, Marius.

[burque505]

@robodesign, Keysharp's syntax is basically that of AHK v2 (there is some support for v1 syntax, but I don't rely on it at all myself).

There are some significant differences from AHK syntax at the moment (some of them likely to remain). There are some things such as pointers that required a different approach due to the differences between C# and C++.

If you have Visual Studio, I would encourage you to download the source code from BitBucket and experiment with it. Although documentation doesn't exist yet, there are quite a few test scripts that should give you a good idea of the differences between AHK and Keysharp. There is a W.I.P. GUI test suite that showcases most of Keysharp's capabilities in that regard. @mfeemster is working on implementing classes at the moment.

One addition I especially like is a rich text Edit.

Some things not implemented at present are COM support, a web browser control, and ActiveX support. C# has pretty good JSON support, and I imagine that will be added.

As to the purpose of Keysharp, IMO it should be usable (when complete) for most purposes you'd use AutoHotkey for. Eventually most of the v2 libs should be portable to Keysharp, some with more effort than others.

@mfeemster, BTW, is doing 100% of the heavy lifting - he's a very experienced developer.

Glad you're interested in this, Marius!

Best regards,
burque505.

[robodesign]

@burque505 . Thank you for the reply.

I'm currently torn apart by ahk v2. I really want to migrate to it, urgently. I want to use it, but my projects are too big to switch to v2 - QPV (the image viewer), KeyPress OSD and my bells tower app.

KeySharp catches my interest because one of the goals (of the developer) is to have it run on Linux and Mac. Yes, I have visual studio. I could try to compile it...

I'm in a limbo. I don't know what to do.

Best regards, Marius.

[burque505]

@robodesign, I feel for you, my friend. I have a terrible time switching back and forth between v1 and v2 so far, I have to force myself to do it. Your projects are so massive that it must be an order of magnitude harder for you.
By the way, feel free to PM me if I can help you in any way with Keysharp. I'm sure I know less than I should but I'll do my best.
One other thing, it's pretty painless to keep up with the Keysharp repo if you have git set up to do it. Keysharp compiles in way under a minute on my 8-year-old machine.

Regards,
burque505

[boiler]

I'm currently torn apart by ahk v2. I really want to migrate to it, urgently. I want to use it, but my projects are too big to switch to v2 - QPV (the image viewer), KeyPress OSD and my bells tower app.

You may know this already, but in case it helps you decide to start using v2 for new projects, are you aware that you can have v1 and v2 installed simultaneously on the same machine and have individual scripts be run by whichever version they are written in? That would allow you to write new scripts in v2 while still running and maintaining your current projects in v1. It doesn't require using different file extensions for each or anything like that.

[robodesign]

@burque505 . I will keep that in mind. Thank you . Do you know if it will have multi-threading support as ahk_h ? Most of my projects rely on that.

@boiler . Thank you for the tip.

Best regards, Marius.