AHKCon 6: IDEs / Editors   Which to use, Why, & How to evaluate them
Channel: AUTOHOTKEY Gurus
Date: 07/08/2022

In hour 6 of AHKCon we discuss various AutoHotkey Editors / IDEs and which ones you should use depending on your skill level, needs, and goals.

You can learn more about AutoHotkey Editors here: https://the-Automator.com/best-autohotkey-editors-ides/

Summary: VS Code, Notepad++, Sublime Text, and SciTE are popular editors that offer Intellisense features like autocomplete and syntax highlighting to make coding easier.

1. 00:00 💻 Intellisense features like autocomplete and syntax highlighting make coding easier in popular editors like Vs Code, Notepad++, Sublime Text, and SciTE.
 1.1 Vs Code is the most popular editor for AutoHotkey, but Notepad++, Sublime Text, and SciTE are also popular.
 1.2 Intellisense is a feature that assists with syntax highlighting and understanding of commands and functions in a language.
 1.3 The lexer assigns meaning and color to words, autocomplete allows for quick typing, and intellisense provides a quick overview of options.
 1.4 Alexa's autocomplete and intellisense features make coding easier by allowing users to quickly choose options and providing information on where they are in the code.
 1.5 AutoHotkey Studio has a COM object that can be linked into and used to add functionality, but it is not documented and can be a pain to use.
 1.6 I'm too busy to make plans now.

2. 09:53 💻 Access almost all the functionality of VS Code in a browser without installing it by going to vscode.dev.
 2.1 AutoHotkey Studio is written in AutoHotkey and uses the Cintilla DLL to format text and has many features.
 2.2 VS Code is a solid editor with a learning curve, but it is efficient and has good Git integration.
 2.3 I created a scintilla wrapper for notepad plus plus to get lexing, and now people can use VS Code to collaborate and try it out without installing it by going to vscode.dev.
 2.4 You can access almost all the functionality of VS Code in a browser, but it's not personalized.

3. 14:36 🤔 Easily make changes to code with VS Code online, use an IDE for features like debugging and git integration, and use AutoHotkey for regular expressions.
 3.1 You can access VS Code online and modify code, save it, and send it back as a pull request without needing to install it.
 3.2 Isaiah showed us how to easily push changes back to the author of a cloned repository.
 3.3 IDEs offer features like debugging, intellisense, extensions, plugins, git integration, and file comparison, making them preferable to editors for coding.
 3.4 Multi-line typing in an IDE can be used to quickly make multiple changes to text, such as adding double quotes or reformatting.
 3.5 You can do regular expressions in AutoHotkey, but you have to adapt it to how they implemented it.

4. 21:02 🔎 Use VS Code's auto-highlighting and debugger features to quickly find and inspect variables and objects in your code.
 4.1 Hit escape, type the desired word, hit shift+double quotes to quickly replace multiple words with the desired word.
 4.2 Choosing an editor with features like auto-highlighting can help you quickly identify variables and words used only once.
 4.3 By default, the highlighting feature in VS Code is case sensitive, but you can modify the search options to make it case insensitive.
 4.4 To quickly find a word, put the mouse on it and scroll over to see if it is present in other locations, or use a hotkey to select all instances of the word.
 4.5 You can use the VS Code debugger to peek inside a multi-layer object structure up to five layers deep and see the original object that created all the objects.
 4.6 The limitation of the debugger is due to inheritance structure, only visible two layers deep.

5. 32:11 🔍 Chad has created a hotkey search tool with a fuzzy logic algorithm to quickly modify settings and save time.
 5.1 Chad is sharing how to use hotkeys with the tools to access powerful debugging features.
 5.2 You can create hotkeys with conditions and chain multiple hotkeys together to switch keyboard layouts.
 5.3 Searching for hotkeys can be made easier by using a hotkey search tool.
 5.4 Search bars and hotkeys can quickly modify settings and save time.
 5.5 Chad has built a fuzzy logic algorithm that weights off the first letters of words to make searches faster and more efficient.

6. 38:18 💻 Studio makes it easy to quickly develop programs with keyboard-driven shortcuts and snippets.
 6.1 Studio makes it easy to break out functions into separate files and pull them back in with a hotkey.
 6.2 Intellisense allows you to quickly jump between functions and add controls to screens with a few clicks.


7. 45:09 💻 Quickly loop over XML strings and modify user snippets with JSON strings using this code.

8. 49:57 💻 Use a personal variable list to store words and phrases, and save your editor settings in the cloud to ensure consistency across devices.