Gee's Blog World: Is the AutoHotkey project dead? A quick word with the developer

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Is the AutoHotkey project dead? A quick word with the developer

Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Open Source

AutoHotkey is one of the most incredible applications ever. As far as programming languages go, it's not exactly elegant. But it is easy to learn (if not to master), free, open-source and insanely powerful.

But I guess you might already know all that. What you might not know is why no new AutoHotkey version has been released since September 25, 2009. That's almost a year of stagnation: for one of the most active scripting communities on the Web, that's a small eternity. Is the project dead?

Several AutoHotkey branches started popping up, including a .NET port called IronAHK and other varieties. And still there was no word from AutoHotkey's developer, Chris. He was simply gone; no word on the forums for months, despite multiple threads wondering where he is and whether or not he's deserted the project

I decided to send Chris an email, and to my surprise (and delight), he replied! It turned into a short interview, which you can read after the jump.

Download Squad -- I'm a huge AHK fan, and have recently released a script on DLS itself. It seems as though you are not very active onAHK recently; would you care to comment on this?

Chris -- Due to other commitments, I haven't been working on AutoHotkey much lately. I'm not sure when this will change.

However, other developers have been creating various enhancements such as Unicode, objects/arrays, and multithreading. If you're interested, some of their work is discussed at the forum.

Wow, thank you for replying! Great to hear from you! Do you officially endorse any of the new branches?

Due to a time crunch lately, I haven't tried any of the other versions of AutoHotkey. I know only a few general things about them based on snippets others have told me.

Have you considered taking on any other developers for the main AHK source tree?

Developers have always been welcome to work on AutoHotkey. I tried to make this clear starting in 2006 with the topic AutoHotkey Needs You. However, I suspect that only a small percentage of AutoHotkey users consider themselves programmers, and an even smaller number of them have any C or C++ background. Additionally, I've expressed to other developers my desire that AutoHotkey stay focused more on its missions (automation, hotkeys, and GUI) rather than on becoming a general-purpose programming language. These things may partly explain why there has never been a large team of developers working consistently on a single version of AutoHotkey.

Have you considered using AHK as a personal PR vessel? It is one of the most amazing automation products ever created for the PC (IMHO), but your bio isn't anywhere on the site for potential employers/customers to find. Is that on purpose?

I just wanted AutoHotkey to empower people to do automation and hotkeys. Those are areas I really enjoy rather than being related to my career.

Bottom line: AutoHotkey isn't "dead", but it's unclear when Chris intends to come back to the project. Personally, I would not rush into using any of the new variants, because they are simply not thoroughly tested enough. I think the best thing that can happen for this project is that someone pitches in and starts working on the main code branch; it's not fully clear to me why that isn't happening, but I can only hope that some day, it will.

It would also be fantastic if Chris could ever monetize AutoHotkey and receive something back for all of the time and effort he's put into this community; however, that is even less likely to happen.

I'd like to thank Chris once more for talking to me and being so frank on the matter.