God created the earth in six days, and then on the seventh day He rested. I suppose He was tired and needed a break. but, He wouldn't have needed to rest if He had AutoHotKey. He could have just written a script to create the world and have finished on the first day.

ok, maybe AHK isn't that awesome, but it is really neat. as i mentioned in a recent forum post and an old forum post AHK can do some really cool things to enhance your computing, and especially enhance your development environment. it may seem useless at first, but once you use it for a little while you can whip up some scripts that really come in handy.

AHK can interact with applications in many different ways, which allows for some nice scripts which enhance other programs. many of the commands are hooks to windows API calls, so the scripts are pretty quick.

.ahk files are plain-text files that are mostly script code. symbolic representations of hotkeys are placed in the script and serve as entry points into the code. when you press a hotkey, the script is executed starting at the entry point as marked by the hotkey. its easier to show than explain:

#m::
MsgBox, You pressed windows + m
Return

each hotkey is followed by two colons, and # is the symbol for the windows key (all key representations are listed in the documentation). so, this script is executed when you press windows + m. it doesn't matter what application you're in, AHK will detect the keystrokes and run the script.

any code that is placed before the start of the first hotkey entry point is executed when the script is loaded. this allows you to do whatever necessary initialization you may need to do. as far as i know, all variables are global and do not need to be declared. functions may be an exception to that, but i seldomly define my own functions in AHK and i can't remember how scoping works then.

a simple (and very handy) script that i wrote a while ago contained two hotkeys, both slight variations on the same thing. when you held down a certain key combination and clicked the mouse the script would get the color of the pixel that you clicked on and copy it to the clipboard. one hotkey copied the RGB values in decimal to the clipboard and the other hotkey copied the hex values.

even if you can't think of a handy script to write, i encourage you to download AutoHotKey and try it out. some day you'll think of a neat use for it and you'll be glad to have it then.