The first thing is to be very precise in what you want.

I thought you wanted a window manager now you mention a full blow GUI API.

Frankly if you want to ovehaul Pharo GUI API , personally I think hands down a Pharo QT project will be far more valuable.

Windows may have an overwhelming market of 90% of OS users but the same is not true for developers. Developers are far more attracted to other platforms like MacOS and Linux. MacOS especially has a very loyal and quite large developer crowd. So a WIN API solution will not be as attractive as cross platform QT.

QT not only work on Win, Mac and Linux , it also work inside Web pages , iOS and Android.�� If we take into account that mobile is the most rapidly growing market you can imagine why QT is so much loved by devs.

I also recommend to get your hands dirty and learn C. Yes there are easier solutions out there, much easier, but knowing C does not open a door it opens a multiverse of possibilities. Its a huge bonus to have in your coding arsenal. C and C++ may not be as loved as Pharo but its a necessary evil none the less.

There is also the .NET options which provided the native gui on widnows and recently it open sourced and gained support from Microsoft for other platforms. Basically M$ bought Xamarin , the company responsible for MONO , a .NET that can run on pretty much any platform with support for C#, Python, Delphi, J#, F# and many other langauges.

But personally I do not trust Microsoft.

In any case using an existing GUI API will make your life eaiser. Both QT and Winforms (.NET GUI API) are very well designed but Win API (especially MFC) are a monstrosity.

Another solution is to get your hands dirty and help with Bloc, the new replacement for Morphic which is the standard Pharo GUI API. I am sure Bloc devs would love your assistance and Bloc already works well so it will be eaiser for you too. You can instead focus on features you care the most and bring those features inside Bloc or as a separate Pharo library depending on Bloc.��

This will be extremely valuable for your Pharo user because we will be moving to Bloc slowly next year and thus they wont have to learn a new GUI API.
Hence why I said that you need to define a precise strategy. Pitch your ideas , discuss them here, see if there devs already working on similar features.

You will be surprised how much "buried" Pharo code there is out there. People make it for personal use and never both to advertise it or even mention it.

Coders are generally terrible at 3 things

1) GUIs
2) Code design
3) Promotion

On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 3:17 PM lw1990 <lukewallace1990@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you all for the excellent replies
I will be rereading them, here are my thoughts/responses for now:

There exists a windows scripting language called autohotkey
(autohotkey.com), similar to autoit, which does everything I want, I merely
wanted to make similar functionality in Pharo so I could use Pharo - it will
be better for large and ambitious windows projects.

AutoHotkey is open source and the source of the language is in C.

So, most or all of the necessary C code is hopefully already available, I
will just have to figure out how to put it into Pharo. It will not be as
ambitious as Autohotkey itself because Pharo has most of the functionality
required by default - all that is needed is DllCall's for the Windows API to
get/set values, hooks to be aware of Windows Messages, and perhaps one day
an API to create native windows gui's using Pharo syntax. That is at least
all of the main stuff I can think of that would be useful to most business
people that want to automate their windows OS.

Pharo offers a very good IDE/debugger and programming environment, and
natural language syntax which Autohotkey lacks. Autohotkey is the best there
is right now, but I believe Pharo could surpass it quickly once some of this
functionality is implemented. The number one reason Autohotkey is easy to
use is because the community is extremely responsive and helpful, and Pharo
seems to be this way too :-)



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