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I am looking for a Mac application similar to AutoHotkey. What are the best Mac applications in this category?

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Also, it's just "Mac", not "MAC". –  dnord Aug 23 '09 at 2:30
Maybe he's referring to physical addresses of NICs :-) –  Joey Aug 23 '09 at 7:23
Somewhere out there is a person who know exactly the right program for you, but has never heard of AutoHotkey, because he's a dedicated Mac user. As written this question won't get an answer from them. –  dmckee Aug 23 '09 at 14:16
@dnord - Nitpicky/unnecessary. –  Matt Aug 3 '12 at 21:29

6 Answers 6

up vote 3 down vote accepted

What subset of AHK functionality are you trying to mimic?

Quicksilver comes up in this discussion kind of a lot. You can have it store snippets of text, fire scripts, and move a lot of stuff between programs.

For actual "macros", there's TextExpander. That's an input manager that sniffs for certain key combinations and then dashes in to backspace over your magic shortcut and replace it with something static or dynamic. Like on my system, "ddte" becomes "2009.08.22" in any program whenever I'm typing.

Automator or AppleScript might give you some of the macro stuff without actual macros. You'll be dealing with actual application hooks instead of input hacks, but it's worth checking out.

There's also Spotlight.

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There are also the system key bindings, with DefaultKeyBinding.dict. –  jtbandes Aug 23 '09 at 3:48

I used to use Auto HotKey for some ergonomically-minded key remapping under Windows - when I switched to a Mac, I started using Keyboard Maestro to do the same things.

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Look into IronAHK. It's a rewrite of Autohotkey for .NET and Mono. Works perfectly under Mono on Mac.

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Can you please expand on "works perfectly"? I keep reading that there are huge gaps in functionality that weren't ported over. Then I tried it and I found the same. –  Matt Aug 3 '12 at 21:30

Keymando was created for exactly this. You can create key mappings, setup system automation commands, application launchers, and much more.


Full disclosure: I'm the creator of Keymando. Please feel free to ask any questions.

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Try QuickKeys

With QuicKeys you can automate the common things you do all the time. And you can also automate the tedious things you don't do all the time — things that are hard to remember.

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