With macro's you can record your keyboard keystrokes and mouse movements. When you have to do repetitive keyboard and / or mouse movements in a program you can record them with a macro and play them back with a hotkey. Macro's are extremely powerful when doing repetitive text editing.

Macro Record

Create a macro recording hotkey with the command = Macro Record Edit, hotkey = Control + Shift + R. Options to record the mouse movements can be selected. When you press this hotkey the HotKeyz tray icon will change from orange to red to indicate that you are busy recording a macro. When you are finished recording your macro, press this hotkey again (Control + Shift + R) and the HotKeyz tray icon will change from red to orange indicating that you have finished recording the macro. You will be prompted to give your macro a name. This will be the name of the macro file with a *.mac extension. This file will be located by default in the HotKeyz.exe folder and can be edited by using notepad or any other text editor. After specifying the macro file name HotKeyz will determine if this filename has been used with another hotkey. If not it will open the New Hotkey screen so that you can define a macro playback hotkey for the recorded macro. If the macro file is already set up to be used by another hotkey you can now simply press that hotkey combination to play the recorded macro back.

Make sure you use a descriptive filename to differentiate between all your macros. Also remember if you are backing up your HotKeyz folder it is important to copy all the *.mac files to your backup directory.

Macro Play

Create a macro playback hotkey with the command = Macro Play, hotkey = Control + Shift + P. You can select the macro file from the open file button in the parameter tab. Select if this macro should be played back at a Normal or Fast speed. Select Release all keys if you want the macro playback only to start after you have released all keyboard keys. When you press this hotkey (Control + Shift + P) the HotKeyz tray icon will briefly change from orange to blue to show you that HotKeyz is busy playing your macro.

Macro Loop

Create a macro playback loop hotkey with the command = Macro Loop, parameter = filename, hotkey = Control + Shift + L. You can select the macro file from the open file button in the parameter tab. When you press this hotkey the HotKeyz tray icon will change from orange to blue to show you that it is busy playing your macro.

The macro will play repetitively until you press the Macro Loop hotkey again so that the HotKeyz tray icon change from blue to orange.

FAQ:

With Macro recording there a box labeled "Mouse Relative". Under what circumstances would you check this box and under what circumstances would you leave this box blank?

The mouse relative, is a relative to the Desktop area and not the active window. If Mouse Relative is checked, and you record in Notepad, it will record the mouse movements relative to the desktop area and not inside Notepad's window area. If you un-check it to be not relative it will always record to the Notepad window's area i.e. top, left, right & bottom and not the Desktop area. I hope I explained that ok. The best is to play around with it and see how it behaves.

I have been unable to get the mouse macros that I have created online to work properly. When I play them back they do not move the mouse to the exact spot that I want it to go.

Also remember that if you want to record mouse movements and mouse clicks, always make sure you start the mouse at the same starting position otherwise it will not work. What I do is start the recording then position the mouse bottom right and then move it to top left (position 0, 0), this ensures that even if you playback the macro later and the mouse cursor is not at the bottom right it will always end up at top left (position 0,0) because the cursor cannot move beyond that point.