While No One Actually Ever Completes an AutoHotkey Script, Some People Get Much Closer Than Others

Last June I started a series of blogs on “Finishing and Polishing AutoHotkey Scripts.” (Ironically, I never finished either the script or the series of blogs.) I wrote six articles aimed at making a script more flexible and user-friendly. Once I had added a menu bar to the GUI window, my chosen menu items provided a map to the ultimate finished product. In the course of that work, I introduced a number of methods for enhancing the program.

The techniques include:

• The value of adding menu bars to Graphical Users Interface (GUI).
• Sensing data changes for auto-save routines.
• Using alternative file extension names for special file formats.
• Another GoTo command trick to avoid rewriting subroutines.
• Saving default settings in the Windows Registry.

Since the topics have rolled off the list of recent blogs on the Home screen, I’ve added a page listing the articles included in the series to the “AutoHotkey Topics and Series” menu at the top of this page. I did this as part of my effort to make it easier for AutoHotkey users to navigate this site.

These techniques do not apply to all scripts, but focus on those based upon a GUI pop-up window—in this case, the InstantHotstring.ahk script. You’ll find the most recent version of the work-in-progress source code at the end of the ComputorEdge Script page’s “InstantHotstring” listing—linked under the name InstantHotstringMenuBar.ahk.

See the blog list for this topic at the “Finishing and Polishing AutoHotkey Scripts” page.