The coding environment

There’s no full-blown IDE (Integrated Development Environtment) for AutoHotkey yet. But there are some tools and projects that are presented on this page.

The editor

To edit your scripts, you could basicly just use Windows Notepad. However, that offers you no features to make coding easier. In the forums, you’ll find plugins for Notepad++, Notepad2, Scite etc. that enable syntax highlighting. The most popular editor is Scite4AutoHotkey, which is almost a real IDE for AutoHotkey. It is based on Scite, but has a lot of custom additions.

GuiCreator

There are several scripts in the forum called “Basic GuiCreator”, “SmartGui”, “SmartGui+”, “LilBuilder”, … Those scripts let you create GUIs (AutoHotkey windows) by dragging and positioning controls (What You See Is What You Get) and output AutoHotkey code. One of them is also integrated with Scite4AutoHotkey.

TillaGoto

TillaGoto is an AutoHotkey script that works with Scintilla editors (such as Notepad++, Notepad2, Scite, Scite4AutoHotkey, …). It makes navigation through your code easier: you can jump to labels and function definitions. It is also integrated in Scite4AutoHotkey.

WindowInfo tools

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ResEdit

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ChameleonCoder & AHKModule

ChameleonCoder (CC) is an IDE project that will be adapted to AutoHotkey by it’s AHKModule plugin. CC is still in early alpha, AHKModule isn’t even so far.

SmartDevelop

SmartDevelop is another IDE project for AutoHotkey, also in alpha stage.

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