autopilot-rs VS TPMouse

Reciprocally, it's just amazing how much better AutoHotKey is at scripting the computer is than everything else is. The language was clearly never the reason why AHK persisted.

There's works like AutoPy (https://github.com/autopilot-rs/autopy) and AutoPilot-rs (https://github.com/autopilot-rs/autopilot-rs), but they offer like 1/100th the capabilities AHK does.

Personally I think this kind of computer-control is the perfect environment for teaching computing. Rather than writing apps or webapps, I feel like the idea of just writing code to do what you the user would do anyways, but better, is a fantastic introduction to computing & programming. In my ideal world, we'd have an EVE Online server that specifically re-enables the game-client's python interpretter (and periodically does total wipes), so folks can learn to program by scripting not just their desktop, but a complex & interesting game, via it's rich api.

The changes doc would be 10x more usef if it included more examples of the changes. https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/v2-changes.htm

I do wish programmers had more options in general for this kind of thing. I ran into https://github.com/autopilot-rs/autopilot-rs lately but it is extremely simple. On Windows there s UI Automation, which can help script many conventional apps. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/ui-automa...

And for Windows, my https://github.com/esporttoys/TPMouse was inspired by warpd itself but focuses more on the intuitive usability of direct cursor control via inertia/momentum.

You may be interested in how I did my Windows script for adding three-finger drag[0].

Basically, it is an independent subscriber to RawInput messages that only keeps track of whether or not to send three-finger drag, and posts emulated mouse messages using SendInput. I have a few other scripts that each run as independent userland processes that only monitors their own trigger and nothing else.

Tangentially, not sure if this might serve for some inspiration, but my TPMouse[1] script implemented inertia in a framerate-independent way so that it uses very little resource while having perfect simulation stability.

A previous discussion where I explained the analytic derivation for this low-resource exact-solution damped inertia can be seen in [10]

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/PrecisionThreeFingerDrag/blob/...

[1] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse

[10] https://old.reddit.com/r/Trackballs/comments/ym9q2t/tpmouse_...

With the TPMouse script I implemented the activation shortcut as LShift+RShift+ which I felt had a nice balance between deliberateness and easy-to-reach (since you are using it with your hands on homerow).

Though because some keyboards have key rollover issues with using both Shifts, Capslock+ is also allowed as an alternative activation shortcut.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse

I personally use AutoIt a ton as a super fast way to quickly prototype GUIs. It's basically a really simple entrypoint for WinAPI.

Shameless plug: my script for emulating a trackball with your keyboard [0], and my tray app for quickly tweaking your cursor speed (usually for when I'm drawing something)[1]

  [0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse