Hacker News Reader

Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

What I really want to know is , what can I use AHK for? Seems like for most "programming"-type things I reach for Python or C#.. these days it's been PowerShell, and I don't know what to use AHK for.

Would love suggestions.

View on HN

I have a program in my taskbar. I often need to right click on it, navigate to a particular menu and select an item.

I wrote an AHK script for it and bound it to a keystroke.

You cant compare pwsh, c# or python with AHK - the quick on-boarding experience and easiness of use is on another level. You can make very big improvements in your daily workflow with just 1 line of code. Its that awesome. I use it in last 20 years for various purposes, be it speeding up web development or fixing video player quirks.

Language was never good, but it was good for what it was designed for, 5 to 10 liner scripts, but then people liked AHK so much that they used it as general purpose langauge (myself included). For example its still the easiest way to create a GUI, in just a couple of lines of code you can have meaningfull tool window which does things.

With AHK2, the language is way better and consistent (cudos to Leixkos and this decade+ long effort), and it makes other people able to create good libraries for others in it.

You should not miss it. For me, not using it is like not knowing Regular Expressions or some HTML.

I use it mostly for automating repetitive actions that cannot be otherwise automated with bespoke scripts. A simple example is I needed to test drawing 255 selections on a screen. So I just wrote a couple loops to automate drawing tons of triangles while I was eating lunch. But I've written ones that process tons of files in an application and go through all the sub dialogs to see if they were functional.

It is a nice tool for this because it works on anything you can see (and some things you can't) so if the software can be used then you can automate it. Sometimes you have to fall back on the image recognition sledge hammer but there is always a way out.

I have emacs, terminal, and chrome bound on a hotkey so I don't need to fiddle with alt tabbing. Also have custom mappings for volume control (way easier than hitting the laptop's default fn-f2/3 combo) and three pre-determined screen brightness levels that set the brightness perfectly when my ambient lighting is dark/normal/bright.

Also I have mappings that basically clone all the keybindings from MacOS that I cannot live without, so alt-t is new tab, shift-alt-[ is prev tab, alt-q closes application etc.

A good place to start is hotstrings:

    ::;shrug::¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you type `;shrug` anywhere AHK will replace it with `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`.

Some things I have hotstring'd: my ACH routing number, my home address (for filling out forms and sending to friends), useful unicode symbols like — and →, the current date in both American and ISO format, common search prefixes, and my personal zoom link.

I use Alfred's snippets for those, and they work perfectly :)

  ::tflip1 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
  ::tflip2 ┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)
  ::shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and ::email for my email address

Win+; gets me (´◡`)(●'◡'●)╰(°▽°)╯: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:(/ω＼)(^///^):-)^_^:-Dಥ_ಥ(┬┬﹏┬┬)ᓚᘏᗢ

emoji/symbol pickers are great for rarely used symbols, otherwise you can't beat key chords without a context switch to another window. It's also easier to customize AHK scripts as you go. You can also have context-sensitive shortcuts (e.g., different things in different apps), OS pickers aren't that smart

Are hot strings case-sensitive? Would be nice to always replace "THe" with "The".

I tend to hold the shift just too long in general. Would be nice if I could replace "[A-Z][A-Z][a-z]+ " with the fixed second cap automatically every time.

Yup, `:C:THe::The` will do it.

shortcuts and shortstrings, no python/C#/pwsh will get you there (though for some lower level shortcuts that only involve rebinding keys to each other there are contenders)

Then also controlling some apps here and there, AHK is the fastest tool to get there

Aside from text snippets and invoking some actions, I haven't really discovered what I can use AHK for.

Any more complex examples that doesn't work in python / c# that easily?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com