4 ms·
Ask HN: Any good alternative to AHK?
Got this little AHK script that got bigger overtime. It's a price checker tool for a game called Path of Exile:
https://github.com/thirdy/trademacro
Where it:
1. activates on clipboard copy event
2. parses clipboard data
3. do a POST request
4. web scrape the result
5. format and output into a tooltip
AHK is great bec:
1. Very easy to use, just like javascript, you only need a notepad and run it right away
2. It has solid support for defining hotkeys.
3. Easy tooltip, but it gets messy beyond simple ones.
4. Small runtime, a few megabytes. This is good since users are non-programmers who don't want installing stuff.
5. Easy for non-programmers to contribute since it's very simple for making macro scripts. Not a must, but good to have.
While AHK is okay, the code gets messy fast and hard to debug if you do not know all the language rules and best practices.
I would like to ask if there's something else I can go for? Have an easier life, statically typed, lots of compiler checks (in AHK, if you got something wrong, goodluck!).
- profalseidol 10y agoI think [jnativehook](https://github.com/kwhat/jnativehook https://github.com/kwhat/jnativehook), is one good route. Now I just have to find the right scripting language and package java as self extracting 16mb 7zip. ``` import org.jnativehook.GlobalScreen; import org.jnativehook.NativeHookException; import org.jnativehook.keyboard.NativeKeyEvent; import org.jnativehook.keyboard.NativeKeyListener; public class GlobalKeyListenerExample implements NativeKeyListener { public void nativeKeyPressed(NativeKeyEvent e) {} public void nativeKeyReleased(NativeKeyEvent e) {} public void nativeKeyTyped(NativeKeyEvent e) { System.out.println("Key Typed: " + e.getKeyText(e.getKeyCode())); } public static void main(String[] args) throws NativeHookException { GlobalScreen.registerNativeHook(); GlobalScreen.addNativeKeyListener(new GlobalKeyListenerExample()); } } ```