Advanced Usage¶
This document covers some of AutoHotkey.py’s more advanced features.
Threading¶
In Python, the threading module can improve the responsiveness of
applications that accept user input while other tasks are running in the
background. A related use case is running I/O in parallel with computations in
another thread. These are actual OS threads, as opposed to AHK pseudo-threads.
AutoHotkey.py calls AHK functions from Python by registering a callback in AHK with RegisterCallback. These callbacks are not thread-safe. That is, while the main thread is busy executing an AHK function, calling another AHK function from another thread yields unpredictable results. It may even crash the program.
Thus, the global AutoHotkey lock (GAL) was introduced. GAL ensures that only one OS thread interacts with AHK at a time.
For background threads to work, the main thread must also be crunching Python
code, for example, actively waiting for the background threads to finish.
However, calling threading.Thread.join() in the main thread blocks AHK
message queue handling. In such cases, AHK cannot handle hotkeys and other
callbacks.
Instead, let AHK handle its message queue by calling ahkpy.sleep()
repeatedly while checking that the background thread is alive:
import threading
th = threading.Thread(target=some_worker)
th.start()
while th.is_alive():
ahkpy.sleep(0.01)
asyncio¶
AutoHotkey.py works well with asyncio. When starting a long-running loop,
schedule the ahkpy.sleep() call repeatedly. This gives AHK time to process
its message queue:
import asyncio
import ahkpy
async def main():
# Schedule a function that will check AHK message queue repeatedly.
loop = asyncio.get_running_loop()
loop.call_soon(sleeper, loop)
print('Hello ...')
await asyncio.sleep(1)
print('... World!')
def sleeper(loop):
ahkpy.sleep(0.01)
loop.call_soon(sleeper, loop)
asyncio.run(main())
Check out the example of a TCP server
that receives keys strings and passes them to ahkpy.send().
GUI¶
Out of the box, Python provides the tkinter package, an interface to the
Tk GUI toolkit. AutoHotkey.py supports tkinter, so it can be used to
create user interfaces.
The following table contains a list of AutoHotkey GUI controls and the corresponding tkinter counterparts:
AHK Control |
tkinter Widget |
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