Record keyboard and mouse

[Ed Greenberg]

Hi Folks, 

I can't find any documentation on the "record keyboard / mouse" function under "tools."

I wonder what it is used for.  For instance, if I want to write a quoted string that causes autokey to emit something, but I'm not sure of the syntax of the various special keys, couldn't I record it, and then see what it recorded?  I can't see what, if anything it recorded. 

Could somebody point me at documentation, or explain? 

Thanks, 

Ed Greenberg

[Joe]

That's a good question.

First, to answer the underlying question, you can find our latest documentation at https://autokey.github.io/index.html. This is for 0.96.0, but most of it will work if you haven't upgraded from 0.95.10 or older. (Please upgrade if you haven't!) In particular, see https://github.com/autokey/autokey/wiki/Special-Keys and check out the rest of our wiki.

Now, the embarassing part: Long ago and far away, script recording was broken. I believe it got fixed, probably in 096.0, but IDK. I haven't tried it for years. Something was done with it in .0.096.0. There's an item in the change log.

I just poked around and found pieces of the code that implements it, but no info on how to use it.

I'm going to post on Gitter and see if anyone responds.

Joe

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Ed Greenberg wrote:

>I can't find any documentation on the "record keyboard / mouse"
>function under "tools."

Yeah, that's our fault. We should get on that.

>I wonder what it is used for.

It's used for recording your keyboard and/or mouse events into a
script so they can be replayed later by running the script.

>For instance, if I want to write a quoted string that causes autokey
>to emit something, but I'm not sure of the syntax of the various
>special keys, couldn't I record it, and then see what it recorded?
>I can't see what, if anything it recorded.

That's true, and it will work that way. Joe has already given you
some good links, but I'll toss in a basic example of syntax for
a script that causes AutoKey to emit foo into the active window:

keyboard.send_keys("foo")

AutoKey uses the keyboard.send_keys() API call instead of a print
statement, so if you're familiar with Python, you can use that API
call anywhere where you would use a print statement to get it to
print something to the active window.

>Could somebody point me at documentation, or explain?

As you discovered, there isn't any for that yet, but I did some tests
with it today and created a discussion for it in the AutoKey project
here:

https://github.com/autokey/autokey/discussions/1049

Feel free to try out the same tests I did and to join in the
discussion. We'll get this figured out as well as possible and find a
good spot to write it up in the wiki. Unfortunately, we can't
currently edit the AutoKey documentation, but once that's resolved,
we can copy what we put into the wiki over to the official AutoKey
documentation.

--
Little Girl

There is no spoon.