2020-05-13

May 13, 2020 · 1 min read  ·
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AutoHotKey equivalents on the Mac

Hillel Wayne’s In Praise of AutoHotKey has been making the rounds. AutoHotKey is an Automation tool/language for Windows. I’ve been a Mac user for a long time, so I’m more interested in Mac equivalents. People discussed some of the Mac equivalents on Lobsters.

I’ve been an Alfred user for years. It’s a great tool that I use many times a day and it makes automation easy using pretty much any programming language. What I like about Alfred is that I find it a lot harder to remember a million modifier+key combinations that I don’t use frequently. Alfred has a nice UI for running commands (with completion) instead.

I’ve also had some success with Keyboard Maestro, which is able to do some automations that are outside of Alfred’s sweet spot.

A comment on Lobsters also pointed to Hammerspoon, which allows Lua-based scripting. This has some of the unusual sorts of triggers that Keyboard Maestro has, but without the GUI for managing the actions.