> Theoretically you can do the same thing that AHK does in a .net language or even Powershell but AHK is just easier to whip up something very quickly.

This is exactly how I see it too. 10+ years ago I would have written a C# app to do something that I can now do in AHK.

Of course there's limitations (I wouldn't write a super intensive native app in AHK) but for little workflow optimizations it's so good.

For example, I wanted a quick and dirty way to grab the hex color under my mouse cursor and copy it to my clipboard. With AHK it was:

    #h::
    MouseGetPos, MouseX, MouseY
    PixelGetColor, color, %MouseX%, %MouseY%
    StringLower, color, color
    clipboard := SubStr(color, 3)

And now when I press Windows + h as a global hotkey it does what I want. I set it up to start when Windows starts and it uses 1.5MB of memory. Can't really beat that for overall efficiency (few minutes of coding, doesn't take up much resources, etc.).

A while back I wrote a blog post on using AHK for defining global hotkeys. I still use that method today. If anyone cares, that's at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/remap-and-set-global-hotkeys-...