I love Autohotkey but I’m not crazy about its programming language, so I decided to investigate building an alternative with a simpler language, namely Python.

Turns out the key sniffing portion is actually quite easy to do. Here’s a simple script from the Keylogger in Python thread that does it in 10 lines using pyHook and Mark Hammond’s Win32 Extensions:

import pyHook
import pythoncom

def OnKeyboardEvent(event):
	print event.Ascii

hm = pyHook.HookManager()
hm.KeyDown = OnKeyboardEvent
hm.HookKeyboard()

while True:
	pythoncom.PumpMessages()

Mindtrove’s post has further details including code and examples for event filtering.