Feature/Hotkeys

Not sure what interface I want hotkeys to take.

keyboard is a project that offers cross-platform hotkeys and keyboard actions.

Not sure if to model after keyboard or do something else.

Here’s a quick mockup I have in mind

myhotkey = Hotkey('CTRL+T', some_script)
myhotkey.start()  #  start the process with the hotkey trigger (e.g. listening in the background)
myhotkey.stop()  #  stop the script

Where some_script would be an ahk script to put under the hotkey declaration.

Another possible idea would be to have hotkeys have the ability to perform callbacks for Python functions, similar to keyboard, but I can’t think of a great way to accomplish this at the moment.

[spyoungtech]

@Maracko there are some improvements on the way that may help your use case. But let me try to answer your questions:

proper way to close the ahk executable on exit cause it sometimes is left active even after my python script stops?

This library uses finalizer hooks to ensure the AHK process (like those started for hotkeys) is closed. However, as mentioned in the official docs using os._exit will not allow cleanup handlers to run. As such, the hotkey process may be left running.

So, in short, if your python script exits normally (even with an exception), there shouldn’t be anything you need to do to ensure the ahk executable terminates.

There are, however, cases where cleanup might not run, such as when a Python fatal internal error is detected, or when os._exit() is called.

In your example, changing os._exit(1) to sys.exit(1) should ensure the AHK process is closed.

there a way to start an event loop so the app doesn’t close immediately after execution?

I’m 100% sure what you mean here.

For Hotkeys, the main Python script must continue to run for the hotkey to continue running. If your app consists only of the AHK hotkey, then you can do something like this:

ahk = AHK()
hotkey = ahk.hotkey("#n", "Run Notepad")
hotkey.start() # call .start() to start the AHK process listening to the hotkey
while True: # keep the main thread alive so hotkey will stay running
    try:
        time.sleep(0.5)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        hotkey.stop()  # technically you don't have to call stop. 
                       # The process will stop on its own when the script ends
        break

There are a few improvements on the way that may help your situation:

1. as mentioned earlier Python callbacks for hotkeys are going to implemented in the near future. So something like if ahk.key_state("Control") and ahk.key_state("Shift") and ahk.key_state("1") could reasonably be re-written as a hotkey.

2. There is a daemon feature coming in #111 that will offer greatly improved performance. Currently, each AHK command runs in its own process. The daemon feature will allow AHK commands to be executed in a single long-running AHK process, which should improve efficiency by an order of magnitude, especially for scripts that call methods in rapid succession.

Lastly, I may add a wait_forever method to hotkeys… but it will likely just be something simple, like the while loop I wrote above.

Hope that answers your question. Let me know if you still have other questions or always feel free to open another issue.

[gtusr]

Since we already have the python keyboard project for creating powerful hotkeys from scratch, maybe a useful goal for this project is to incorporate hotkey functionality in a way that makes it as easy as possible to port existing autohotkey hotkeys to this framework.