AutoIt, is it worth investing time on? After AHK?

I’m looking at AutoIt as alternative to AutoHotKey and there are some things its better at apparently but they are not made too clear in my opinion after some searching on the interwongle.

It seems to be more accepted by businesses and also seems to get a lot more malware hits as its used to compile dodgy code. So although legitemate the antivirus software highlights it.

The scripting is tighter than AHK so it might be worth exploring. I’m trying to search for some scripts to load to see what it can do over and above AHK. I haven’t found a site yet.

It seems for IT Admin users and loading software on new PC’s it has its reputation but I can’t see too much else jumping out at me.

AHK with web and DB stuff is a little limited and it would be nice if there were better tools in this area, especially hooking into Servers and doing stuff there, like Python maybe, but with automation.

Installing

I tried installing latest beta version but I had to install stable version first. That was a bit of an added process. After doing so I could run a couple of the scripts but couldn’t get it to run in VS Code. I said on install that I wanted to run 64 bit rather than 32 bit. I think this caused errors later in VS Code

VS Code running

I tried a couple of plugins but couldn’t get VS Code to run, it kept sying no debugger for AutoIt. I tried creating a launch.json file but that didn’t help.

After watching this video:

After installing all the extensions for autoIt for VS Code I got the debug console to display ‘autoit3’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file. Prior to that I’d only get errors in Terminal.

I finally thought about issue of 32 & 64 bit and saw there was indeed 32 & 64 bit executables so once I pathed to the 64 bit .exe it ran fine. “C:\Program Files (x86)\AutoIt3\AutoIt3_x64.exe”.

I also needed to set path to autoit directory for it to work on 2nd PC too. So had to go into control panel to do that.

So I can now run .au3 scripts inside vs code. I have a dirctory for it so now I can work through the examples.

There is also a downloadable pdf book that I’m reviewing so hopefully I can write a little bit of code.

Scripts available

I’ve been looking at some of the sites for scripts eg Awesome Autoit and there seems to be the same scripts as AHK but not as extensive, the only ones it seems to stand out with are DB & server connection libraries/scripts and that sort of makes sense as it is more a business uptake tool.

Forum a bit sarky and arrogant

I looked up a couple of topics and some of the fob offs by people posting on questions that would be reasonably answered on the AHK forum are replied to very dismissively, I can’t see the point of them replying if it was beneath them to think the question wasn’t worth asking.

Overall a poor tone to the forum site in my opinion, it wouldn’t encourage me to ask questions. there is a presumption of a certain skill level before you go onto forum.

End comment

After the vibe of the forum and the code available I am not in any rush to delve too far into AutoIt. I have no immediate need for it and it offers me no solutions that I can’t achieve with other programs, so no need to rush to use it.

I’m pleased I visited the program, and have it up and running in VS Code, but apart from that I think I’ll stick with AutoHotKey.

If I need to link to DB’s in scripts I may revisit Autoit although I may think about using powerShell instead, since I’ve been playing with AutoStarter & .Bat files , they seem to work fine and may work for that need.

Coding is tough enough and having to ask a bunch of stuck up unhelpful people for assistance does not have any appeal for me, I’d rey using something else instead first.

I may investigate Python again for automation, that may be more useful.