Background

AutoHotkey (ahk) is amazingly powerful and you could write a script that could automate your computer to do anything from play chess to design a space-ship. (This is not a balanced or objective view. This author is a huge fan of ahk.) That said, sometimes we just want to cut-n-paste and then play with the code until we understand enough to be dangerous, (rather than fully understanding.) For those that would rather know enough to be useful I've included a well commented example that contains the defaults that I use.

Presumptions, Defaults and choices

Editor: Notepad++

The first thing that I did, after glimpsing the true power of AutoHotkey was to do roughly what techturtle suggested. This sets Notepad++ as the default editor for AutoHotkey.
  1. run regedit
  2. Find HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AutoHotkeyScript\Shell\Edit\Command
  3. modify the value to be 
    notepad++.exe %1
This works on Windows 7.

Not everyone wants salt in their porridge

Where possible in the cut-n-paste examples, I've limited it to the function being demonstated. In most cases you will probably want to combine it with other functions or features.

Key mapping

ahk is amazing. If your delete key breaks you can simply re-map it to F9 with: 
F9:: Send, {Del} ; re-map F9 to be Delete
but if that is all you are after then you might be better off with a specific tool for that job, such as SharpKeys [1]

Where do we go from here?

I've been toying with the idea of writing an AutoHotkey parser in haskell as a way to improve my haskell and to get closer to implementing a Unix program that will be 100% compatible with AutoHotkey version 1.1
Life isn't the same in the Unix world, and many of the things that ahk would be used for on Windows can already be done in other ways. That said, why not strive to have a cross-architecture support for this wonderful scripting language. I'd like to see all of the examples here work on BSD,Linux and even Mac.
Footnotes
[1] SharpKeys is also available from the authors site: www.randyrants.com - yes it is SFW, despite the name.