Which is better for quickly developing small utilities? AutoIt or AutoHotKey or something else?
I need to develop some small software for which I think using some professional suite like Visual Studio will be overkill. Most of the macro recording tools like AutoIt or AutoHotKey provide enough power to write decent application. Plus they are small and free.
Which option will be good? Using one of these tools or using some other small/free compiler?
They are both pretty good, and can do most of the same things... but I typically use AutoIt over AutoHotKey for the following reasons:
If you need a GUI at all, then you'll need to use AutoIt.
I prefer the syntax of AutoIt over AutoHotKey's. IMO, it is much easier to follow, and pick back up when you need to go back into your code later.
I like that AutoIt makes it very easy to change version numbers, icons, and compression of your compiled scripts (when compiling to exe). The default compression will sometimes cause false positives with some anti-virus software.
Ultimately, though, it really depends on what your requirements are for your small utilities.
Both are really good pieces of software and you will only decide by trying both of them out with tests that check if you can create your small bits of software.
Me personally I would probably investigate AutoIt in depth and if it started to mess me about I would then check AutoHotKey and others.
You can pretty much do whatever you can in one in the other, but I think it breaks down to: (1) short, keyboard shortcut driven utils and (2) more complex, UI driven scripts. For example:
I use AutoHotKey scripts every few minutes, and use AutoHotKey here over AutoIT because it's snappier to launch (ie via keyboard shortcuts).
I use AutoIT scripts every once in a while to do more complex things, such as to run multi-stage tasks that require a UI... or for when I would like to easily produce a compiled .exe
Related
What is the best way to control a program's user interface (clicking, entering text, drop down selection, etc) when the program has no available API?
I've heard of AutoHotKey and FlaUI and watched a few videos but haven't seen a great example yet. Before I go too far, is this the best direction/method?
Thanks!
FlaUI is a fully fledged UI Testing library that allows you to automate all aspects of a Windows application. As author of it, I of course recommend it. If you do have a bit of programming know how, it should be fairly easy to use. In case you just want some scripts to run locally, you don't even need Visual Studio or Visual Studio code, you can just use RoslynPad for example and directly create and run your code there.
I use this all the time for small automations, heck even sometimes to input very long passwords in a remote machine where I cannot use copy/paste.
I try to use this 2 projects for primitive gui testing automation:
http://www.ptfbpro.com/
http://www.autoitscript.com/
And I can't make my choice.
Can somebody explain me: why(in 2 or 3 lines) he use one of them(or other please specify)?
I use AutoIt...
because it's free, well documented (not only) from inside of the Scite Editor and you can easily compile your script into a small executable or even create a complete GUI and there is a very good community in the forums and around here. And its Basic-Like Syntax is really easy to understand, there are functions and even a foreach-syntax, dynamic arrays and lots of additional functions from other users... There's good integration with other programming languages and from the use of so many WinAPI functions you lack of very little possibilities. It can automate IE usage without even displaying a browser window and send network packages, you can send Keystrokes like a user sitting in front of your screen and there's the AU3Record Tool which allows you to just record a Macro and replay it or save it as a script and then you can easily optimize it and edit it for your needs. Or use the AutoIt Window Info tool to see all the possible handlings for your application, you can interact with any kind of program output/display according to different algorithms you may invent.
Enough facts? ;-)
Go with Autoit3. It 's a lot more reliable, and you have a complete script language. Ptfbpro is only a tool (not free), nothing more. AUtoit3 has a lot of contributors that can help you in your process, Ptfbpro is dead.
If you want a script taht really do what you want, just go for AutoIt. Ptfbpro can't be used as a professional tool.
Autoit3 as well. You really can't beat it for being free and so easy to use.
I was wondering what place scripting has in today's world of IDEs and GUIs.
I'm new to programming and am wondering at what point I should, if at all, open up the PowerShell terminal for a particular task. What do people here use scripting for and how important is it to a modern developer working full time with C++/C#/Java?
In general, you will want to write a script if you ever expect to do the task more than about twice. Making a script has the following advantages:
it's not dependent on human operation (humans are fallible)
it's repeatable
scripts can be stored in source control
This is well suited to tasks such as build, deployment, and automated testing.
IDEs and GUIs don't handle the testing or deployment parts of the development process well quite yet.
Scripting is also great when you want to do something quickly just to see. Personally, I use my Python interpreter as a super-calculator all the time. I also use it to parse files, combined with regular expressions.
Scripting is also often used to allow clients to easily extend a system's behavior. Using a script language, a compiler (or even an IDE) is not necessary.
See Extending Packages with Scripting for an example in SQL Server 2008.
Another point to add is that several servers which are highly used do not have any GUI. Everything is run from a terminal. Almost everything is run through a script. While GUIs are nice, they are not going to be used all the time.
It's been more than an year that i'm developing a new scripting language with its own grammar rules and constructs.
I'd like to give the users of this language some minimalistic ide to work with, but i don't want/have time to make one from scratch so i'd like to take one already existing (it has to run on Linux platforms natively, so no windows-only editors plz) and customize it.
Well, which one is the easiest to customize without changing the source code and recompiling it, maybe even with plugin support?
Thank you.
UPDATE
I don't need to know which editor is the best for you, i need to know which one is the easiest to customize AND, most of it, which one has the most complete documentation about new language customization.
Ex: SciTE is good, but its documentation about custom grammars is really poor.
Have you looked into Scintilla/SciTE? I think it gets used often for this sort of thing. It's very lightweight, but from what I understand, is easy to add functionality to. It's not really an IDE, but it's more of a text-editor component that you could use as the basis for a simple IDE. I've used SciTE, which is a sort of demo text editor of Scintilla's capabilities. It's simple, but also quite fast and responsive.
I suppose another option would be to write plugins for existing IDEs such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Both of these IDEs support many languages just through 3rd-party plugins. Going this route means you don't need to build a complete UI, just the components needed to make your language work.
The downside of building plugins for an extendable IDE (such as NetBeans or Eclipse) is that you are at the mercy of the IDE developers. If they change the way the platform works, you must ensure that your plugins still work with the new versions. Sometimes this can become a major problem.
All of these options should work on Linux as well as Windows.
This sounds like a very ambitious project and I wish you luck.
I don't use linux too often, I use a Mac and my favorite text editor is called TextMate because it has snippets, code completion, and a whole mess of other features. The closest thing to it that I've found on linux is called Scribes.
There's always Emacs or Vim (I lean towards Vim, but that's just my opinion :) ). Neither are IDEs per se, but both are very extensible and it shouldn't be too hard to create settings for each that will aid people writing scripts in your language.
I realize you can script Microsoft Office apps, but I'm looking for something more general that I can apply to other apps, such as Adobe Acrobat, web browsers and other apps with no scripting ability.
I've used AutoIt but it's a bit clunky, especially when trying to debug why a script fails or stalls. Also, getting the timing of actions, such as clicking a button, or selecting a menu item correctly can be a pain.
Are there build tools that could be used for this purpose?
I recommend AutoHotKey. Its syntax is not pretty, but most of the times you don't have to concoct your own scripts, because its community is so large and well organized. Even if you do, the documentation is extensive and good and the forums will answer your questions quickly. The developer is active and responsive, which means that bugs get fixed quickly, and new features are being considered and added.
Since I began using AHK I don't imagine doing without it - it allows to make life on Windows simpler in so many ways.
You can also employ the COM interface from Python and other scripting languages. It is more complex, but you get to use a more powerful language.
I love AutoHotkey (small k...) too, but beside its odd syntax, it has the same lack of debugging tools...
Basically, that's "show msgbox alerts, send strings to file or debugview, trace". Which is OK for most cases, since you rarely write long and complex applications with these tools.
In both tools, and probably all macro softwares, "timing of actions" will be hard to get anyway, because events are asynchronous: most of the time, you don't wait a given time, but you wait for a window to appear. Hoping it is the right one!
There are other automation tools, like Ranorex (I didn't tested it), you can even use some scripting language (Lua, Python) with a library to send messages (WM_XXX) and another to call WinAPI... But tools like AutoIt and AutoHotkey have the advantage of having been extensively tested, so they can handle a large number of behaviors/issues (like waiting for clipboard data to be available, etc.).
Might be a bit much for your needs but AutoMate is very robust and easy to use. Doesn't require any scripting skills as most tasks can be constructed via drag and drop http://www.networkautomation.com/sales/scripting/