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Comment by bananamerica | Hacker News Reader

In many relevant ways, Windows is more easily hackable than Linux. That is in no small part due to Autohotkey, but also many other tools made by independent programmers.

Autohotkey is vastly superior to anything available on Linux, where one must string together several arcane tools to achieve similar scripting effects. Autohotkey serves for everything, it is extreme reliable and predictable. I know someone will shout "there's Autokey on Linux! And pyautogui!". Rest assured, I know these tools. They're not nearly as reliable and comprehensive as Autohotkey is on Windows.

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> Linux, where one must string together several arcane tools to achieve similar scripting effects.

You only need to know one – awk.

Is AutoHotkey like Emacs keybindings and hooks but for the whole OS?

I would most certainly not compare Autohotkey to Emacs in that way, as Emacs, powerful as it is, is not really meant to be the same as Autohotkey. However, Autohotkey can do pretty much anything you can think of in terms of GUI OS level local automation (for cli, I'd probably use WSL).

On Linux, I may sometimes have to glue xmodmap + xcape + xbindkeys + xdotool + wmctrl + whatever-else in a bash script that will probably require reading multiple man pages and multiple iterations to get right. Autohotkey would only require accessing a single source of solid documentation, as it can all be done in a single Autohotkey script that doesn't rely on any other tool.

More often than not GPT will give you the entire code that you need on the first or second response. But it only knows Autohotkey version 1.

Or for a more "hackable" experience on Windows, you can do what (I expect) AutoHotKey does, and send window messages to apps to trigger "key press" and "mouse down at X coords".

By analogy it's as is there's a single stable interface to the GUI layers in apps mediated by the OS, instead of poking at X APIs.

Yeah... I just tried to make st terminal to start maximized using wmctrl. For half an hour

I'm not a programmer but still... It's a little demotivating.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't recommend hitting the APIs directly over AHK unless you're a developer who wants their control.

FWIW if you want something to start maximised I'm sure there's a flag in STARTUP_INFO to say that when you create process

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