
Robotgo v0.42.0 released - vvvway
https://github.com/go-vgo/robotgo/releases/tag/0.42.0
======
drakenot
This looks like an interesting project. I was really big into the AutoIt
community back in the day. I think being able to write programs that simulate
user input is a great way to learn programming. It is an amazing thing to
watch an automation script you wrote fly through controls, menus and actions
of 3rd party programs as fast the program can keep up.

I remember all the drama surrounding the split or "fork" of AutoHotkey from
AutoIt and the subsequent changing of licenses to make future AutoIt releases
closed source.

Being able to write AutoIt-like scripts but in a cross-platform way would be
great.

~~~
pmoriarty
Why did AutoIt split from AutoHotkey? I hadn't even heard there was a split.
Is there somewhere I can read more about this?

Which is the dominant user input automation tool on Windows these days? I'd
thought AutoHotkey was it, but maybe not?

~~~
drakenot
It was the other way around. AutoIt is older than AHK. My understanding was
that a developer wanted to add "hotkey" functionality to AutoIt and this
didn't garner much interest from the AutoIt folks.

So, the developer then decided to create AutoHotkey which was source
compatible with AutoIt v2. The rest I'm a little hazy on. I believe that it
was this fork that led to AutoIt switching to closed source.

They both have been in development for years now after the switch and I don't
believe that AHK maintains scripting compatibility with AutoIt any longer.
They have diverged at this point.

------
Walkman
IMO Go is not a great language for Desktop automation like this. A script
language, not statically typed language fits better, because it makes it
possible to iterate faster. Also these kind of automation scripts are not huge
usually, or if they are, they are very simple. Also don't have to be fast. The
only advantage I can think of Go has here is the easy deployability for
multiple platforms, but that's not even possible, because the platforms has
different UI-s with different sizes, so you can't write one script and expect
to work on multiple platforms.

~~~
serf
>but that's not even possible, because the platforms has different UI-s with
different sizes, so you can't write one script and expect to work on multiple
platforms.

game UI usually stays the same across all platforms. As someone who has
written bots for video games that are cross-platform, it's nice to abstract
away things like win32api when dealing with just trying to move the HIDs.

Plus if your language/software allows for pixel read-in (this does), I
wouldn't blame the scripting tool for non-robust applications -- make your
application a bit more intelligent. Don't just blindly click at preset
coordinates and expect reliable/consistent results except for the most basic
automations.

~~~
onmobiletemp
Thats interesring. What games did you work on? What kinds of bugs were you
trying to find?

------
notheguyouthink
I wonder, could something like this be used for automated testing? Eg, UI
testing is always a concern of mine - i like full end to end testing, but UI
is difficult.

I wonder if we could have somewhat machine learning trained image recognition
bots click a Next button, without having to specifically provide the image.
Making testing much less cumbersome, and more like "click button X, require 10
list items on screen", etc. Note that this package doesn't have any ML i
believe, it was just an example since this package does have bitmap comparison
it looks like.

~~~
yorwba
You could try to integrate it with whatever a screen reader does to read the
text on buttons to its user. As a bonus, all your UI tests double as
accessibility tests.

~~~
vvvway
Thank you for your suggestion,I will think seriously about it or add it.

------
senthilnayagam
what openAI gym and universe do with VNC , we can do it locally with robotgo
now

