AutoIt vs. FastKeys vs. PowerShell vs. Wing Python IDE Comparison Chart

AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement, and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages. We looked at many editors to see which one was the most useful editor for AutoIt. We found SciTE and saw its potential and wrote a customized Lexer for the syntax highlighting and syntax folding and created a special installer called SciTE4AutoIt3. AutoIt was initially designed for PC "roll out" situations to reliably automate and configure thousands of PCs. Over time it has become a powerful language that supports complex expressions, user functions, loops and everything else that veteran scripters would expect.AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying "runtimes" required.

PowerShell is a cross-platform task automation and configuration management framework, consisting of a command-line shell and scripting language. Unlike most shells, which accept and return text, PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), and accepts and returns .NET objects. This fundamental change brings entirely new tools and methods for automation. Unlike traditional command-line interfaces, PowerShell cmdlets are designed to deal with objects. An object is structured information that is more than just the string of characters appearing on the screen. Command output always carries extra information that you can use if you need it. If you've used text-processing tools to process data in the past, you'll find that they behave differently when used in PowerShell. In most cases, you don't need text-processing tools to extract specific information. You directly access portions of the data using standard PowerShell object syntax.