Does KM record and/or store keystrokes?

I’m looking for a TextExpander alternative because TE records and stores your keystrokes. This is a security concern if anyone was able to hack my device. TE does this in order to suggest snippets you may want to create. Does KM have a similar feature?

For what I think you’re asking, the answer is “No, it doesn’t store or record them.”

However, of course it has to process them, and because of things like “Typed String Triggers”, it may keep some of your recent keystrokes in memory. But it doesn’t log them, or write them to disk, or anything like that.

Right, @peternlewis? :slight_smile:

As for being a TE alternative, search the forum and you’ll find quite a few topics on the subject.

I hope that helps.

Thanks so much for the quick response @danthomas :blush:

@peternlewis I’d definitely appreciate a second opinion :+1:

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Keyboard Maestro stores in memory up to the last 50 or so key presses when there are any Typed String triggers active. This is not stored to disk, and Keyboard Maestro has no comparable feature to TextExpander’s suggestions - whether I would ever implement a similar feature I could not say at this point, though I have no current plans in that direction.

You could enable debugging preferences for the Typed String triggers which would log details of keystrokes.

You could write a macro that triggers on every keystroke and records it.

You can record your keystrokes with the recording facility in Keyboard Maestro (though a recording panel is shown while you do that).

Keyboard Maestro (and TextExpander presumably) cannot see keystrokes while Secure Input Mode is on (generally this is whenever you are in a password field).

So if someone has access to your Mac and the ability to read your files (which they would need to do to compromise this facility in TextExpander) then they could presumably adjust your debugging preferences and/or write a macro you probably would not notice, either of which would similarly compromise your security.

As usual, once an attacker has access to your account, all hope of security is lost.

As far as TextExpander goes, I don’t think I’d want the feature myself, there are times when I write sensitive things on my Mac that are not passwords that I would not necessarily want recorded (credit card numbers might be one example), but its probably not a serious security risk per se.

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Thanks so much @peternlewis that was extremely helpful!!