Update on 7/15 Coding Snack Weekend - and a prize for skrommel

[mouser]

sorry i've been so slow with a post about the coding snacks weekend we just had - i've been working around the clock on nothing but the new clipboard tool - as any programmer will tell you it's hard to pull yourself away once you start a new project.

skrommel was on fire this weekend, producing a number of extremely cool AutoHotKey scripts which will be going up on the coding snacks download page tonight.  It was a wonder watching him solve these requests like little puzzles.

in recognition for his contribution this week, we have decided to give him a prize, on behalf of everyone on this site.  skrommel please let us know whether you want a free copy of VmWare Desktop Workstation, or BB FlashBack Pro, or Techsmith Camtasia 3, or whether you prefer to wait for the next donated software we get.  If you'd like to re-donate it to someone else you may do that as well.

[mouser]

Skrommels scripts have been compiled by me into a single Coding Snacks download zip, which includes the .ahk, the compiled .exes, plus a little readme for each which include pointers to appropriate forum posts.

http://www.donationcoder.com/CodingSnacks/index.php

[mouser]

i still think skrommel's scripts deserve their own web page (along with a couple of the other coding snacks tools).

[nudone]

sounds like a good idea, especially if there are going to be more scripts coming from skrommel.

i must say it's probably the first time i've been inspired to look at 'autohotkey' in a serious way. skrommel has really opened my eyes to how quickly these sort of tasks can be solved.

i sincerely hope there will be more to come from skrommel. a true coding snacks saviour if there ever was one.

[zridling]

I finally finished reading every word of the AutoHotkey Help file this week, and will start on the forum for more. One thing I really like is that its developer, Chris Mallett, updates it continously in response to user requests and bugs. I've been able to ditch several commercial software apps now that I can do more with AutoHotkey. Thanks everyone, and thanks to skrommel for sharing.

[nudone]

this is probably the wrong place to ask but here goes anyway...

i've been using a 'hotkey' manager called 'hoekey' for a few years now - i always thought it the best of the bunch when you can be bothered to figure out the syntax.

it's nowhere near as versatile as something like 'autohotkey' but i'm wondering if i replaced 'hoekey' with an 'autohotkey' script that performed the same tasks (a few hotkey shortcuts for starting common programs and moving/minimising windows about with the keyboard instead of mouse), does anyone think there will be more system resources used by an 'autohotkey' script.

'hoekey' takes up about 340k when running and, as i understand it, 'autohotkey' uses a few meg (?????????). does this actually mean anything, especially when i've got 1.5 gig or ram.

i assume it doesn't really matter and i ought to know better without asking such things. i just have grown attached to 'hoekey' and wouldn't want to dismiss it when it has served me so well for so long.

[mouser]

personally i've stopped worrying about a few mb of memory usage of an app -
just like i stopped worrying about disk usage of apps.
why have a good machine with lots of memory if not to take advantage of it.

that said, if hoekey works for ya..

[nudone]

yes, very sensible. totally pointless worrying about such minute memory wastage. i should know better than to worry about such things.

the main reason for discarding hoekey was to try and get the autohotkey script to do a few more things. like Zaine has said, he has replaced quite a few utils he was using and instead used autohotkey.

seems i'm asking questions without thinking them through. if i want autohotkey to do more than hoekey then there isn't anything to decide upon.

[kfitting]

I also have recently started using AutoHotkey (been using AutoIt and Shortkeys before this)... I've found that upon intial startup (AutoHotKey that is) it consumes about 1.5 meg of ram.  I have a number of hotkeys/expand text things in the startup script and mem usage stays around 1.5 meg even while using them.  If I try to edit the script or do anything else, mem usage jumps up to about 3.5 meg and remains there until I close AutoHotKey and restart.  Like others said, the functionality does make up for a little more mem usage and, like mouser said... 3 megs!?  Just some info I've gathered.

Kevin

[zridling]

I've got a pretty large .ini file built with AutoHotkey — 56K! — and it only consumes about 3M on my machine, but I didn't notice a significant difference when I loaded other scripts. With 4G of memory, though, it's never even noticeable. And compared to other apps running processes such as GMail notifier (almost 9M) and OutPost Firewall (22M), it's fractional. So yea, I don't even think about it until you mentioned it.