I have never used AHK before. Can someone please explain to me what _could_ it bring to the Linux world given that scripting is much easier in general?
It's a simple and valid question, but I'm afraid the answer is rather nuanced. Most things you do with AHK are also possible on Linux in general, but in a much more fragmented way. AHK (in its complete form) unifies most functionality of xbindkeys, xdotool, GUI creation (no common tool I am aware of), popups, wmctrl, unix tools like echo/cp/, assistive technology, window manager tools, grabc, and many more, out of which some aren't even possible without sophisticated programming like Hotstrings (auto-replace while typing), ImageSearch, StatusBarGetWait and all those things. It also ships with many common programming language features such as math operations, and brings its own equivalents to unix tools like FileCopy and FileAppend.
Then there's also AHK's ease of use, which also makes it appealing to non-programmers or beginners. Every piece of logic (even loops etc) is basically encapsulated in a single-word command instruction, almost like ASM, but for humans. You create GUIs with `Gui, add, button`, maximize windows with `WinMaximize Firefox`, hotkeys with `a::MsgBox You pressed a` and so on, and all of that with basically no code. I'd recommend you take a short look at the AHK documentation, such as the intro or alphabetical list of commands. It gives you an idea of what you can do with it.
Besides, the entire language is visually oriented (and so is this implementation of mine): You create, edit, run, reload, and (optionally) compile scripts usually not by using terminal, but by context menus. This makes it far more accessible for people migrating from Windows, apart from the fact that you can apply your acquired AHK skills from Windows.
Finally, I have found that the existing Linux automation-specific tools (which mostly boils down to xdotool) are, in comparison to Windows AHK, inferior. Getting Windows-like automation functionality on Linux is quite a task. The main difference is that very often, you just don't need Window or Hotkey automation on Linux, because most programs are CLI-first, thankfully.
It shows a failure of the "Unix Way" imo. Everyone hand-rolling their homebrew combination of 20 different tools together is sometimes not the best way to go.
We can look at Docker, Kubernetes, Dropbox(etc), desktop environments, and many other things to see that people greatly value almost the complete opposite approach, within some sweet-spot.
The reason that no nontrivial popular program exists written using shell scripts is because the Unix Way of gluing together separate programs just isn't a sustainable software development methodology that leads to nontrivial useful software.
Here are a few things I've done in AHK on Windows:
1. Move cursor to the toolbar icon of an app, right click, navigate menus, and select an option (all with one keystroke).
2. Click a button in one program. Copy file. Switch to Excel. Switch to the right worksheet. Click a VBA button. Switch to another sheet. All with one keystroke.
3. With one keystroke, set certain settings in Visual Studio (via the menu) and run the debugger.
4. With a keystroke, sign out of Teams/Skype.
5. Launch screenshot program, present me with a dialog box asking for filename, and have it save the screenshot in a directory and provide me an Org-mode link to the saved file.
These are all "easy" in AHK. I never learned it well enough to do more advanced stuff.
AHK's prime utility seems like hacking optimizations on inefficient-for-power-users gui software.
It kind of makes sense then that this was made for and got popular on windows, because that OS is absolutely rife with annoying gui software written for the lowest common denominator of user.
Whenever i infrequently have to use windows I'm a bit shocked at the number of clicks you need to get anything done.
OK, here's one for you. How would you automate a task in Firefox? Here's something I need to do often (to get around a bug in FF):
1. Press Ctrl P to get to the Print dialog
2. Scroll to "Print Using System Dialog"
3. Click on Page Setup.
4. Select 2 Pages per side.
5. Choose "Letter" for Paper Size
6. Click on "Print"
I can automate this using AHK on Windows. How would you do it on Linux? And how is running Firefox on Linux helping me any more than Windows?
> 1. Press Ctrl P to get to the Print dialog 2. Scroll to "Print Using System Dialog" 3. Click on Page Setup. 4. Select 2 Pages per side. 5. Choose "Letter" for Paper Size 6. Click on "Print"
How exactly does this work? Are you just sending a bunch of shortcuts? Or does autohotkey really understand when it reached "Print Using System Dialog" and which button has "Page Setup"?
You might just send all the expected commands in sequence and be fine, but that can be unreliable. Autohotkey can see the text contents of many dialogs and other windows components, which can be parsed and reacted too by the script. And it has functions for sending mouse clicks and keyboard commands, as well as directly editing controls, activating/minimizing/maximizing windows, etc. Unfortunately, I've found many more modern UI frameworks used in newer software have less that 'clues' that can be seen. But Autohotkey does have an image matching function that works well in a lot of cases when the traditional way fails.
> AHK's prime utility seems like hacking optimizations on inefficient-for-power-users gui software.
That's like saying shellscripts prime utility seems like hacking optimizations on inefficient-for-power-users cli software. Every poweruser has always demand for automation, independent of the interface, software and OS.
> because that OS is absolutely rife with annoying gui software written for the lowest common denominator of user.
There are those pesky extra cmd windows that sometimes show up when one gui program has to use a subprocess to run cmd.exe to start another gui program. The only only only solution I found after trying purported solutions in visual basic, powershell, c++, python, etc... Somehow, AutoHotKey's code for finding invisible windows is better than even what's on the msdn site.
xdotool does about a quarter of what AutoHotKey does, and even combined with sxhkd, Espanso, Autokey etc. still doesn't match up. xdotool doesn't do hotkeys itself, and doesn't work well being run with hotkeys involving modifiers (yes I'm aware of hacks involving getting xdotool to release modifier keys - I haven't succeeded getting them to work for anything nontrivial). AutoHotKey also does hotstrings (Espanso is the closest Linux equivalent I know, and doesn't work as well IME), app- or window-specific behaviour, and more.
> xdotool does about a quarter of what AutoHotKey does, and even combined with sxhkd, Espanso, Autokey etc. still doesn't match up.
That may be true of AutoHotKey on Windows but we're talking about a Linux port here where some of the features straight up don't work or don't add anything that didn't already exist in Linux.
> xdotool doesn't do hotkeys itself, and doesn't work well being run with hotkeys involving modifiers
It doesn't do those things because it doesn't need to on any version of KDE or Gnome (or probably anything else) since about 1998, possibly earlier though my memory gets foggy beyond that point.
> AutoHotKey also does hotstrings (Espanso is the closest Linux equivalent I know, and doesn't work as well IME)
Espanso and AHK probably suffer the same fate, given this line from the AHK for Linux Documentation:
> Hotstrings don't work in some applications. Not sure if this is fixable (help needed!). The only reliable alternative is using Hotkeys.
> app- or window-specific behaviour, and more.
You can absolutely do app- and window-specific things with xdotool. It merely requires adding some steps to detect the window or process, which is identical to AHK's approach if you're just writing scripts.
The best thing this port has going for it is that it has a great UI that people are already familiar with and in spite of its shortcomings as a port it is worth checking out.
I'd love if someone spent the time to develop something like this into a script generator for xdotool that could do things like recording mouse movements, etc.
Maybe a wayland-ized version can support hotstrings and the other warty edge cases that don't work on Linux the way they do on Windows.
For developer work, it can automate an entire sequence of GUI annoyances into a hotkey. I'm making this sequence up because I don't recall how it exactly went, but the volume of bizareness was about right. AHK helped me painlessly build JAR files in Eclipse. I'd hit F12 and:
AHK would pull up file menu, export menu, select java, type jar filename, hit next, select jar file, confirm overwrite, next, next, select seal the jar, yes overwrite, click that one random dialog button that's bizarrely not hotkey selectable, type main class as 'default.java', next, confirm, click finish. Click confirm again despite finish because GUI. And bam, another JAR file ready to test.
Well, you always get to weigh the effort of rebuilding a toolchain vs working within the existing clunky toolchain. However, I daresay that reimplementing everything that eclipse does for java is no trivial matter and for a day-long project, not worth my effort.
Though not everything can be done with different development tools and AHK is a versatile swiss army knife. It can also do things like hotkey to make any window stay on top, send window resize message to a runaway or disobedient window, or be hotkey window clicks for games. I use it in stormworks to make my own shortcuts to edit / wiring / mirror buttons since they're 54 inches apart, and hopefully this all shows where AHK's versatility shines.
It automates your desktop with a mini programming language that can be used to build desktop apps; but it's the text expansion capabilities that are highly prized, working across all desktop and web apps and saving you 100s of hours of typing.
Back when I used Windows and played MMOs during the Vista or 7 days, I used AHK to do all sorts of grind-y tasks in-game. For example, grinding professions in SW:G to try to unlock Jedi (game might have survived if you could just pick Jedi classes from the start, just saying ...) and similar painful mechanics in most MMO(RPGs at least).
I did use PyUserInput/PyMouse to "play" Universal Paperclips one time on Linux. Similar, though not nearly as featured, to AHK.
I use AHK to script interactions with a GUI application that I support but don't control the source or database. It allows me to script some repetitive tasks in the GUI and trigger them with a defined key sequence.
Just to add to the list of very bespoke hotkeys, I have one to change the "default" text color of e-mail replies in outlook. If I press Win+A and the active window is part of outlook, it will go into File, Options, Mail, Stationery and Fonts, "Font" for replies, and open the color picker
Helpful when I'm trying to send inline responses in an otherwise busy thread with multiple colors... and then I can switch back to my default blue after that with the same keystroke
For automation, xdotool is pretty good. xprop and wmctrl are not so user friendly though.
As for keyboard remapping, sxhkd is great, but finding what keys are called requires xev or something like it. xmodmap is not easy for beginners either.
At the very least you have to know what to look for. I'm not an advocate of AHK, but having all those options in the same place would be good.
I've used it pretty extensively in Windows to expand text, execute clicks on certain buttons in GUIs, execute clicks on specific coordinates on screen or within a window, and to combine all these things into complex macros.
