In Keyboard Maestro, you have to specifically add a “Pause Until” action. Let’s say you want to wait for a disabled button to become enabled before clicking it. Keysmith is better at recording, and Keyboard Maestro is better at building. It’s worth noting that you can make macros with Keyboard Maestro by recording, and you can build macros one action at a time with Keysmith.
The complexity is overwhelming - especially to newcomers. Someone asks for help building a macro to perform the simple task of opening an app and typing a keystroke. Take this question on the Keyboard Maestro forums, for instance. That power can’t do as much good when it’s buried like that. Keyboard Maestro, on the other hand, can identify UI elements only by simple properties like name.Īnd the flexibility that comes with Keyboard Maestro’s solution is also a double-edged sword - much of its functionality goes unnoticed in a sea of over three hundred actions to choose from. Recording lets Keysmith identify specific UI elements you click on or interact with, which helps it choose the right element later on when playing back the macro. Because there’s so little overhead in creating a macro, you don’t have to think about whether it’s worth the time. In practice, we’ve found that while the builder method allows for more flexibility, the recording method works for 95% of use cases and is much faster.Īnd that speed opens up new use cases. To create a macro in Keyboard Maestro, you build the macro one action at a time by choosing from a list of hundreds of actions. clicking on the Submit button) and do the right thing when there’s ambiguity. Keysmith is aware of buttons, lists, windows, and other UI elements, so it can understand what you’re doing (e.g. Hit record, do the thing you want to create a macro for, and then hit stop. Keysmith whittles those options down to the most commonly used ones and presents them in a much cleaner way.Ĭreating a macro in Keysmith is really simple.
#AUTO HOT KEY CONVERSION TO KEYBOARD MAESTRO MANUAL#
If Slack's delay was longer, I'd have to add a manual wait in Keysmith too.)Įven for someone that has used Keyboard Maestro for years, this interface can be confusing and overwhelming, and it can hide important functionality. (The Keysmith macro works without explicitly waiting because it automatically waits a short time after all actions to smooth out hiccups like this. I also had to add a pause action toward the end to make it work because Slack has gotten sluggish. It’s cluttered with icons and indentation to support the dozens of configurations it might have to display. It’s doing the same thing, but Keyboard Maestro’s UI is significantly more complicated. Now here’s that same macro in Keyboard Maestro: Here’s what the macro to do that looks like in Keysmith: It takes advantage of Slack’s ⌘K shortcut to open up the search bar, types “engineering”, and then presses enter. One macro I use every day is a Slack macro that opens up the #engineering channel. If you think I’ve mischaracterized what Keyboard Maestro can do, please let me know. I’ll say up front that while I’ve used and enjoyed Keyboard Maestro for years, I’ve never taken one of the paid courses available to learn all the ins and outs. Like driving an automatic car, though, Keysmith is so much easier to use that we think it’s the best choice for most people.
Both are fine choices – it’s largely a matter of personal preference. Here’s an analogy: if using Keyboard Maestro is like driving a stick shift, using Keysmith is like driving an automatic.
We often get asked to compare Keysmith and Keyboard Maestro since, on the surface, they seem to be pretty similar tools. Keysmith and Keyboard Maestro are both great tools to create custom keyboard shortcuts for your Mac.
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