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Comment by desmap | Hacker News Reader

Do you guys know AHK? It's Windows-only, has a weird language design but which is terse like no other and it's quite powerful.

I would be happy to learn how you will position your product compared to AHK.

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Specifically the most excellent Lintalist[0] which is built on AHK and which I use daily. I wonder if they'd consider extant offerings and offer a path to inclusion [though Chrome-limited seems a downgrade to me given I use my snippets everywhere]

[0]https://lintalist.github.io

Sorry, I've never used AHK, but my understanding is it's very much focused on scripting UI's.

We support a little bit of that (you can tab between different fields in a webpage with Blaze), but we're much more focused on communications (text).

Most of our features are really about making static or dynamic messages or documents. So for example, lots of forms support, formulas, data validation, etc... And making this all as accessible as possible.

I don’t know about other people, but I only ever used AHK as a text expander. I used it religiously when I worked as a law firm associate and had to use a PC.

AHK is a programming language that does text expansion and a lot more. Check it out.

To give a bit more context to what the others wrote. AHK is the only reason I use Windows and not macOS nor Linux on a desktop because they don't offer anything remotely powerful as AHK and AHK makes my life 1,000x easier/faster. I always wonder how others can use a computer without something like AHK. I dislike its language design and all its quirks a lot but all the alternatives I checked come not close in terms of features and have an even worse UX.

So, there's definitely a market opportunity but I'd go more low-level in order to have OS-wide coverage and preferably beyond one OS but this would be impossible when doing three implementations. Maybe a macOS version is a good start. There you have few options which bring you far but yeah, not as far as AHK.

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