Re: Keyboard Maestro vs FastScripts and others
Re: Keyboard Maestro vs FastScripts and others
- Subject: Re: Keyboard Maestro vs FastScripts and others
- From: Christopher Stone <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 08:22:27 -0500
On Oct 31, 2014, at 13:23, David Crowe <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Christopher Stone mentioned Keyboard Maestro ... what are the good key/action binding apps if you're mostly doing AppleScript (One FastScripts limitation is that is all that it does)?
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Hey David,
FastScripts can run AppleScripts and pretty much anything that can be run from the shell like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. and at only $9.95 USD is quite inexpensive.
I've used it since it came out in 2003.
> Is Keyboard Maestro solidly out front or are there others?
Keyboard Maestro at $36.00 USD is without question the most actively developed macro/automation utility available for the Mac today, and in my opinion has been best-of-breed for some while.
Macworld gave it their Editors’ Choice Award for 2013, so I'm not alone in my opinion.
Peter Lewis of Anarchie/Interarchy fame took over development of KM in 2004(?), and morphed it from a fairly simple app-switcher into a full-fledged automation utility.
Since I owned Michael Kamprath's version of KM already and Anarchy/Interarchy I bought a copy. I've always liked Peter and thought he'd bring something interesting to the table.
For several years I ran KM alongside QuicKeys (in which I had hundreds of macros), and I experimented with it to see what it was good at.
QuicKeys' programmer died, and the product hasn't been updated since Dec 2009.
If memory serves it was sometime in 2010 that I bit the bullet and started porting all of my macros from QK to KM.
At this point I've let go of any notion that QK will ever be viable again. I'm still a bit sad about that, since I used it from version 1.0 on - but time marches on, and software doesn't live forever.
The four primary utilities I use are:
LaunchBar
Typinator
FastScripts
Keyboard Maestro
Although Keyboard Maestro can do pretty much anything FastScripts can do, FastScripts makes getting to and editing my scripts a little easier - which is why it stays on my system. I also happen to like the developer Daniel Jalkut who has been very responsive to bug reports and requests for more than a decade now.
I do run a few AppleScripts from Keyboard Maestro, because it handles asynchronous operations more adroitly than FastScripts. (Although Daniel recently added an asynchronous switch to FS.)
Jon Pugh's recommendation of DragThing is solid if you like Palettes. I've owned a copy for a very long time. I don't use it often, because I'm more of a keyboard guy - but every so often it comes in quite handy. While you can assign hotkeys to AppleScripts I don't believe you can do this on a per application basis as you can with FastScripts. (Jon will correct me if I'm mistaken.)
--
Best Regards,
Chris
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