You can end up with really big quality of life improvements from having a bunch of little things whipped up to solve your problems.
Theoretically you can do the same thing that AHK does in a .net language or even Powershell but AHK is just easier to whip up something very quickly.
Still I wish there were better Python wrappers for Windows automation.
This is exactly how I see it too. 10+ years ago I would have written a C# app to do something that I can now do in AHK.
Of course there's limitations (I wouldn't write a super intensive native app in AHK) but for little workflow optimizations it's so good.
For example, I wanted a quick and dirty way to grab the hex color under my mouse cursor and copy it to my clipboard. With AHK it was:
#h::
MouseGetPos, MouseX, MouseY
PixelGetColor, color, %MouseX%, %MouseY%
StringLower, color, color
clipboard := SubStr(color, 3)
A while back I wrote a blog post on using AHK for defining global hotkeys. I still use that method today. If anyone cares, that's at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/remap-and-set-global-hotkeys-...
It's been added to my growing toolbox(which I lovingly call i3_emulator.exe), thanks!
You can kind of understand what's going on with general programming experience and double checking their documentation.
In the hex code example it almost reads like pseudo code. Get the mouse position and store it into X / Y variables, grab the color under the mouse position, make it all lower case, copy it to the clipboard but trim out a few extra characters that was returned by a previous step.
How is your i3 emulator going? I tried that one tiling window manager AHK script (bug.n) but found it to be a little too buggy to use.
At work we evaluated other solutions like Blue Prism for our internal apps but Auto Hot Key never got a mention. I wonder why.
This is one of the features that keeps me with Keyboards maestro, which keeps me from switching away from macOS.
In your case, from my limited understanding it would be no problem to identify a specific button in an app and then interact with it because you would be hooking into the app's low level window title / class / handles.
AHK comes with a "spy" tool where you can just move your mouse around and it gives you low level details about every window, and then you can write AHK scripts that interact with those things.
The script would look something like:
ControlClick, OK, "My Cool App"
Check the marked answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49516638/ahk-web-element...
The above answer shows both navigating to a new page that isn't open yet or interacting with an already loaded page based on the title of the tab.
It will return the (x,y) and you can then use the Mouse functions to interact with that location.