I find it really useful to record temporary keyboard macros to help with day to day programming tasks. For example, sometimes I need to convert some data into one time use SQL INSERT statements, or re-format some ugly SQL (usually generated by SSMS) into something prettier.
SQL Server Management Studio doesn’t do macros, and the macro recorder in Visual Studio is s…l…o…w… and somewhat flaky due to fighting with the IDE’s desire to control your cursor position, which doesn’t work when you’re trying to record a macro. I find myself just copying and pasting code all the time into TextPad to record and play macros since TexPad is the best utility I’ve found for my purposes. But it’s tedious to copy-and-paste and switch applications for this kind of thing.
So I thought I’d ask – does anyone have a good recommendation for a standalone Windows macro recording application that could be invoked from anywhere? It’d have to support key presses, key combos, mouse clicks, find-and-replace operations, and all sorts of other text manipulation shortcuts like TextPad. It would be handy if it saved the macros as human readable text files that could be hand-edited to correct mistakes. I’ve tried autohotkey, but it seems to be designed more for creating long term macros rather than quick recording of temporary throw-away stuff. Any recommendations?
After digging around some more, I think that the
AutoScriptWriter (recorder)tool that comes with AutoHotKey may be good enough for doing scratch macros. I can at least record and edit my macros, though it’s not quite as simple and streamlined as CTRL+SHIFT+R/CTRL+SHIFT+P for creating and running scratch macros in Visual Studio. At least I can use it with SSMS and other tools that don’t have macro support.