Editors with AutoHotkey Support

Any text editor can be used to edit an AutoHotkey script, but editors which are (or can be configured to be) more AutoHotkey-aware tend to make reading, editing and testing scripts much easier. AutoHotkey-aware editors may provide:

• Syntax highlighting, like what is used in this documentation. With syntax highlighting, words, symbols and segments of code are colour-coded to indicate their meaning. For instance, literal text, comments and variable names are displayed in different colours.
• Auto-complete, which typically offers a list of suggestions when you start typing the name of a known function or variable.
• Calltips may show you what the parameters are for a function while you are writing code to call the function.
• Interactive debugging, such as to step through the script line by line and inspect variables at each step, or to view and modify variables or objects, beyond what ListVars allows.

Recommendations:

• SciTE4AutoHotkey is simple to install, relatively light-weight, and fully supports AutoHotkey v1 and v2 without further configuration.
• VS Code (plus extensions) provides an even higher level of support and a wider range of features, but can be heavy on resources.

SciTE4AutoHotkey

SciTE4AutoHotkey is a custom version of the text editor known as SciTE. Its features include:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto-complete
• Calltips
• Smart auto-indent
• Code folding
• Interactive debugging
• Running the script by pressing a hotkey
• Other tools for AutoHotkey scripting

SciTE4AutoHotkey can be found here: https://www.autohotkey.com/scite4ahk/

Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

Visual Studio Code can be configured with a high level of support for AutoHotkey by installing extensions.

AutoHotkey2 Language Support provides many features, including:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto-complete
• Calltips
• Smart auto-indent
• Code folding
• Running the script by pressing a hotkey
• Real-time diagnostics (detecting common errors)
• Formatting/tidying code

Additional notes:

• This extension only supports AutoHotkey v2, but can also detect v1 scripts and automatically switch over to a v1 extension if one is installed.
• This extension can also be used with other editors, such as vim, neovim and Sublime Text 4. For details, see Use in other editors. However, VS Code likely provides the best experience, with easiest setup.

vscode-autohotkey-debug provides support for interactive debugging of v1 and v2 scripts.

Notepad++

Notepad++ can be configured to support the following features:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto-complete
• Code folding
• Running the script by pressing a hotkey

See Setup Notepad++ for AutoHotkey for instructions.

Notepad4

Notepad4 supports the following for AutoHotkey v2 by default:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto-complete
• Auto-indent
• Code folding
• Running the script by pressing a hotkey

It is available here: https://github.com/zufuliu/notepad4

Others editors

For help finding or configuring other editors, try the Editors sub-forum.

To get an editor added to this page, post in the Suggestions sub-forum or open an Issue or Pull Request at GitHub.