Advanced Usage¶
This document covers some of AutoHotkey.py more advanced features.
Threading¶
In Python, the threading module can be used to improve the responsiveness
of applications that accept user input while other tasks run 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.
Calling AHK functions from Python is implemented in AutoHotkey.py 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, trying to call another AHK function from another thread leads to unpredictable results like program crash.
Thus, the global AutoHotkey lock (GAL) was introduced. It ensures that only one OS thread interacts with AHK at a time.
In order 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 will block the
handling of the AHK message queue. That is, AHK won’t be able to handle the
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, so it could give time to AHK
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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