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AutoIt3 versus AutoHotKey

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Amadawn:
Hi guys,

I've seen several mentions of AutoHotKey here at donationcoder. I just wanted to mention also AutoIt3 (www.autoitscript.com) which is kind of the "older brother" of AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey was originally a fork (or a clone) of version 2 of AutoIt and has expanded some of the capabilities of AutoIt2. But AutoIt3 is a newer, much more powerful version of the AutoIt scripting language, with a much nicer "basic-like" syntax and a lot of improvements (COM support, very powerful GUI capabilities, regular expressions, etc). So I thought that you guys might want to check it out.  ;D

I've been using AutoIt3 for more than a year now and it is quite frankly the best procedural language that I've ever used. Someone was talking yesterday about programs that changed the way they work, and AutoIt3 is one of those programs for me.  :-*

By the way, the developper of AutoHotKey was originally on the AutoIt2 developper team (although he was not the creator of the program) and I believe that there were some sour grapes between the two "brother" projects (I think that some of the AutoIt3 developers were unhappy of how AutoHotKey "rode upon" the fame of AutoIt) to the point that AutoIt3 stopped being GPL because they felt that their code was being stolen from them without the proper credit (now their code is semi-closed, where you have access to an older version and can ask for the newest version once you show your commitment to the project). I don't know much about these problems and I don't want to get anybody angry. I just want to let people now about an alternative to AutoHotKey, AutoIt3, which I think is better for most cases (unless you have a lot of AutoIt2 code which you do not want to update to the new syntax).

Cheers!

Amadawn

P.S.- mouser, this is really not meant to be any advertisement for AutoIt3 or anything like that. I did not know if this is the right forum to post this. As this is the forum where I normally write this is where I posted this. Please feel free to change it to the relevant forum if you think that is necessary.

mouser:
we welcome discussion of different apps and their strengths and weaknesses here, not an add at all.
it's fascinating to hear some of the history of these two apps - i had no idea they had a common ancestor in code.

i always thought autoit was more user friendly but less powerful, but maybe i need to re-evaluate the idea that its less powerful.

mouser:
this might also be a good time to state my view (and a view talked about on this forum in the past with regard to paying for software), that there are a lot of issues that go into deciding which program to use besides just the actual program itself.  ie. support, community, documentation, etc.

f0dder:
I like AutoIt; I've been using it to script parts of my unattended XP setup, and I use it for tasks like automating SCP filecopy to my http server + copying URL to clipboard, using SSH (plink) to create SVN repositories on my server, etc.

I think the AutoIt exes are kind of bloated though, and the language could have been nicer. I'm almost tempted to do something of my own based on LUA, but... well... AI3 does the job and I can live with the exe sizes.

Amadawn:
this might also be a good time to state my view (and a view talked about on this forum in the past with regard to paying for software), that there are a lot of issues that go into deciding which program to use besides just the actual program itself.  ie. support, community, documentation, etc.
-mouser (January 29, 2006, 12:39 AM)
--- End quote ---
You are totally right. For me the support on the AutoIt forums plus the really good documentation that comes with AutoIt were 2 of the most important factors that really made me start using AutoIt3 for a lot of my projects. That and the power of the scripting language itself, which I find amazing :D

Did you know that there is a version of the text editor Scite which has been totally customized for AutoIt3? It is called Scite4AutoIt3. It has code completion and a code explorer and it is integrated with the tools that come with AutoIt3 (like the script compiler and more). You can find the latest version in http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite/downloads.php. There is also a very cool (although not fully finished yet) GUI designer tool called Koda Form Designer which lets you make GUIs with AutoIt3 code in a snap (find it in http://www.autoitscript.com/fileman/users/lookfar/formdesign.html).

As you can see I really like AutoIt3. It has been incredibly useful for my job in the past year :)

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