What are your most common use cases for 'Quick Macro' builtin action?

Questions & Suggestions
1

I’ve seen this action before and even tried using it once, although I didn’t understand how do I record a macro and play it back only a certain number of times, it was still quite useful when I tried manually renaming a big batch of files.

I am curious though, how are you using this action if you are using it at all?

Is the macro I am talking about :

Are you perhaps utilising it with some other action/s together?

2

I’d really like to know, also.

3

I have to edit a lot of excel and powerpoint sheets right now and just found out about the Quick Macro a few days ago. I set Record to “F1” and playback to “F2”, that way i can easily record a quick macro and replay it to make changes multiple times. In addition to that i made 2 more macros to set action delay permanently to “0.15” and to reset it. Those are set to “F3” and “F4” and are used when i have mouse movements as else it wouldn’t work overall(can be fused in one and toggle tho). Only keyboard stuff works without delay.
Last thing I have is the macro from Dan that can import the quick macros in cases i need some more defining of pauses or something like “Move mouse back to old position”.
Its a huge time saver and really good at micro work :slight_smile:

4

The most common case I use it with is reformatting code. For example, I have a lot of code that looks like this:

enum class HotKeyTriggerFireType {
	kPressed,
	kWhileDown,
	kReleased,
	kTapped,
};
#define kHotKeyTriggerFireNamesArray {CFSTR("Pressed"), CFSTR("WhileDown"), CFSTR("Released"), CFSTR("Tapped"), NULL}

Converting from the first format into the second format can be done like this.

Paste in a copy of the first format:

	kPressed,
	kWhileDown,
	kReleased,
	kTapped,

Put the cursor on the start of the first line, and then start recording and type the sequence:

CFSTR(“Pressed”),

Option-Shift-Right, Option-Shift-Left, CFSTR(", Forward Delete, Option-Right, Command-Shift-Right, "),, Forward Delete

Stop Recording, and then press the play back key three times.

For three or four things this is borderline. For ten, this is a great method. For 100, maybe figuring out a regular expression Search & Replace is a better solution.

And, of course, if you do this regularly, then creating a specific macro for this specific case is a good idea.

2 Likes
5

Most of the time mine are set to

  • F1 = ⌘⇧[
  • F2 = ⌘⇧]

…which provides instant tab-switching (left/right) in most web browsers – and many other applications, too. (I use System Preferences to standardize this as needed)

When I need to use them for other uses, I’ll remap them temporarily (usually for a quick repetitive text-editing, like Peter’s example), and then it takes about one second to remap to ⌘⇧[