Automating tasks in Windows

Introduction

This article was started in August 2009 by comparing AutoHotKey (AHK), AutoIt, WinBatch, and KixStart but it might include other solutions later on.

AutoIT vs. AutoHotKey?

AutoIt was first released in 1999, with a lot of the syntax and ideas coming from ScriptIt, a Microsoft project itself based on WinBatch.

The core of AHK was written from scratch, but includes some AutoIt3 code to implement some commands.

The AutoIt community feels that the AHK author didn't give enough credit when forking the code, and since then, no love is lost from the AutoIt community towards AHK.

AutoIT…

is now closed-source, after being the source of AHK
has a stricter syntax than AHK, so takes a bit more time to learn if you have no programming experience
offers a rich library of user-contributed code (User Defined Functions, UDF)
seems stronger if you need to perform intensive GUI automation

AHK…

is open-source, originally a fork that occured when "an AutoIt contributor wanted to add easier hotkey and hotstring support to the language (source)"
is more frequently updated
as the name implies, is especially powerful to write keyboard shortcuts

More infos:

AutoIT

Moved here.

AutoHotKey

Moved here.

Winbatch

http://www.windowware.com

Why choose Winbatch?

KixStart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiXtart

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