AHK2 ActiveX GUI

Good-looking windows for AutoHotkey v2. You build them the way you build a Gui, with Add* calls, events and .Value. They come out looking like Windows 11, or one of eleven other styles, and they switch between dark and light on their own.

Under the hood each window is borderless, and its contents are HTML and CSS drawn by the Internet Explorer engine that every copy of Windows 10 and 11 still has. You don't write HTML or JavaScript, though: every click and change arrives in your AutoHotkey code.

Quick start

Download or clone this repository, then put a script next to the lib folder:

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
#Include lib\AxGui.ahk

g := AxGui({Title: "Settings", Width: 720, Height: 560, Theme: "dark"})
g.AddMenuBar([{Title: "&File", Items: [["&Open", (*) => 0]]}, {Title: "&Help", Items: [["&About", (*) => 0]]}])
g.AddStatusBar([{Id: "msg", Text: "Ready", Icon: "E930", Grow: true}, {Id: "n", Text: "4 devices", Width: 110}])

g.AddPage("general", "General", "E713")
g.AddRow("Icon=E790", "Theme", "Dark, light, or what Windows uses")
g.AddSegmented("vtheme Choose1", "dark:Dark|light:Light|system:System")
    .OnChange((ctl, value, *) => g.SetTheme(value))
g.Use()
g.AddRow("Icon=E767", "Volume", "For alerts and sounds")
g.AddSlider("w170", 60)
g.Use()
g.AddRow("Icon=EA8F", "Notifications", "Banners, sounds and badges")
g.AddSwitch("Checked")
g.Use()
g.AddCheckBox("Checked", "Start with Windows")
g.AddButton("Accent", "Save").OnEvent("Click", (*) => g.Toast("Saved"))

g.AddPage("sound", "Sound", "E767")
g.Show()

The four-character codes (E713, E790...) are icons from the Segoe Fluent Icons font that ships with Windows. The option strings (vName, w170, Checked, Choose1) mean what they mean in Gui.Add.

New to it? The guide takes you from here to menus, dialogs, lists, drag and drop and a single .exe.

Twelve looks, dark and light

One line, Stylesheet: "win98", changes the whole look. g.SetStylesheet(), g.SetTheme("light") and g.SetAccent("#c239b3") change it while the window is open.

Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Windows 98, Windows XP, Aurora, Cozy, Cyber, Parchment (rpg), Instrument, Precision, Inset and Brutalist. See them all side by side, with what makes each one different and how to write your own.

What you get

• Every control a Gui has, drawn the Windows 11 way: buttons, edits, check boxes, radios, drop-downs, list boxes, sliders, progress bars, tabs, ListView and TreeView with AutoHotkey's own methods.
• More than a Gui has: switches, setting rows, cards, expanders, chips, ratings, date pickers and calendars, tag boxes, charts, gauges, stat cards, a data grid with sorting, filtering and grouping, a code editor, a rich text editor, a colour picker, a canvas to draw and animate on, an audio player, and a small game engine: low-poly 3D, or top-down 2D with tiles and pixel-art sprites.
• The window around it: menu bar, status bar, a title bar you can put your own buttons, search box and menus in, context menus, dialogs, toasts, Windows notifications, drag and drop from Explorer, Snap Layouts.
• Native controls inside the page: a web browser, a video player, any ActiveX control.
• One .exe: compile with Ahk2Exe and the themes and icons go inside it.
• A designer. AxStudio lets you drag controls onto a window and exports the script (see below).

Examples

Run any file in example\ with AutoHotkey v2.

Showcase.ahk: every control and component, page by page	Todo.ahk: a to-do list with folders, tags and due dates, saved to an ini
Titlebar.ahk: a window whose title bar holds a burger, a search box and pop-overs	Editors.ahk: the code editor and the rich text editor
Game.ahk: Gem Rush, a low-poly 3D game on the built-in engine, with a live debug panel	The same game with its colliders showing, and the engine's numbers
Quest (a studio template): a small top-down adventure, its hero's stats bound to the panel	The hero and the quest are values with fields, listed in the studio's Logic tab
Canvas.ahk: painting, shapes you drag and animate, a clock, spirographs and a music player	The same example's shapes, animated from AutoHotkey
Retro.ahk: Windows 98, XP and 11, switched live	ColorPicker.ahk: the colour picker as a button, a dialog and inline

Also in the folder:

• Calculator.ahk: the Windows 11 calculator, rebuilt (right).
• Embed.ahk: a web browser, a video player and a document viewer docked inside the page.
• Transparent.ahk: window opacity, shaped windows and a see-through overlay.

The studio

studio\AxStudio.ahk is a designer for these windows, built with the same library. Drag controls onto a canvas, wire them up without code (or with it), press F5 to run the result, and export a plain .ahk script.

"C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\v2\AutoHotkey64.exe" studio\AxStudio.ahk

The studio manual covers the canvas, binding controls to values (including values with fields, like a game character's), rules, the step-by-step editor, and importing an existing Gui script. Its Quest template is a small adventure game made of exactly those parts.

Documentation

Guide	Building a window: controls, layout, events, menus, dialogs, compiling
Components	The big controls: data grid, list and tree views, code and rich text editors, colour picker, canvas, audio, the game engine
Themes	The twelve stylesheets, accents and tints, and writing your own
Reference	Every option, method, event and tag in one place
Studio	The AxStudio manual
Inspector	A DevTools-style inspector for your window: press F12
Generated code	What a script exported from the studio looks like
Extending	Adding a control, a component, a theme or a template
Architecture	How the pieces fit together, and what happens under the hood

Requirements

• AutoHotkey v2.0 or later.
• Windows 10 or 11. The Internet Explorer engine the windows use is part of Windows even where the Internet Explorer browser is not.

The library switches the engine into its modern (IE11) mode for your script by itself, per user. tools\RegisterBrowserEmulation.ahk /machine does it for every user instead.

What's where

lib\AxGui.ahk	The one file you include
version.json	This release: AxGui 1.0, AxStudio 0.9. The studio's Help > Check for updates reads it from GitHub
lib\components\	Every control, one folder each
lib\themes\	The stylesheets
lib\dev\AxInspector.ahk	The F12 inspector (left out of compiled exes)
example\	The examples above
studio\	AxStudio
docs\	This documentation