AutoHotkey_L New Features

This document describes features added in the AutoHotkey_L branch of AutoHotkey development, now simply known as "AutoHotkey 1.1".

Caution: This document has been neglected in recent years and may be missing some of the more recent changes.

Control Flow

Commands

Directives

Functions

Objects

Variables

Datatypes

Unicode

Other

Error Handling

Many commands support using try/catch instead of ErrorLevel for error handling. For example:

try
{
    FileCopy, file1.txt, C:\folder
    FileDelete, C:\folder\old.txt
}
catch
    MsgBox An error occured!

Additionally, the following commands now set A_LastError to assist with debugging: FileAppend, FileRead, FileReadLine, FileDelete, FileCopy, FileMove, FileGetAttrib/Time/Size/Version, FileSetAttrib/Time, FileCreateDir, RegRead, RegWrite, RegDelete.

Function Libraries

In addition to the user library in %A_MyDocuments%\AutoHotkey\Lib and standard library in the AutoHotkey directory, functions may be auto-included from the "local library" which resides in %A_ScriptDir%\Lib. For more information, see Libraries of Functions.

#Include <LibName> explicitly includes a library file which may be located in any one of the function libraries.

GUI Enhancements

A number of enhancements have been made to the Gui command and related:

• A name or HWND can be used instead of a number between 1 and 99 when referring to a GUI.
• Gui, New creates a new anonymous GUI.
• Any number of named or anonymous GUIs can be created.
• New GUI options: +HwndOutputVar, +ParentGUI
• A GUI's owner can be any arbitrary window: +Owner%HWND%.
• Gui, Font can control anti-aliasing of text.
• ActiveX controls such as the Internet Explorer WebBrowser control are supported.
• GuiControlGet, OutputVar, Name gets the name of the variable associated with a GUI control.
• Keyboard accelerators such as Ctrl+O are supported automatically when used in Gui menus.
• Font quality can be controlled by the Font sub-command.

Static Variables

Static variables can now be initialized using any expression. For example:

Sleep 500
MsgBox % Time() "ms since the script started."
Time() {
    static Tick := A_TickCount
    return A_TickCount - Tick
}

Text Encodings

FileRead, FileReadLine, Loop Read and FileAppend support the majority of Windows-supported text encodings, not just the system default ANSI code page. FileEncoding can be used to set the default encoding, which can be overridden for FileRead and FileAppend as follows:

FileRead, OutputVar, *Pnnn Filename
FileAppend , Text, Filename, Encoding

While nnn must be a numeric code page identifier, Encoding follows the same format as FileEncoding.

See also: Script Compatibility

Variadic Functions and Function-Calls

Variadic functions can receive a variable number of parameters via an array, while variadic function-calls can be used to pass a variable number of parameters to a function.

Improvements to Icon Support

Unusual Sizes

Icon resources of any size supported by the operating system may be extracted from executable files. When multiple sized icon resources exist within an icon group, the most appropriate size is used. Prior to revision 17, an arbitrary icon resource was selected by the system, scaled to the system large icon size, then scaled back to the requested size.

Resource Identifiers

Negative icon numbers may be used to identify a group icon resource within an executable file. For example, the following sets the tray icon to the default icon used by ahk files:

Menu, Tray, Icon, %A_AhkPath%, -160