The best part is that Automator is free and comes bundled with macOS, so there’s a lot of community support for it, as well as many prebuilt scripts and workflows.Īutomator also works seamlessly with almost every other app on this list, all of which can run Automator workflows. This lets you do anything you can with Automator at a click of a button, instead of having to open the context menu. If you create a new Service, you can launch it with a shortcut in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services. If you’re an Automator fan, you’ll appreciate this trick. You can check out their getting started guide for more info.Īutomator and Shortcuts: The Built-in Solution Hammerspoon doesn’t do anything except sit in your menu bar until you write scripts for it. While it’s a little more advanced than some of the other apps we include here, Hammerspoon offers a powerful way to communicate with the system at a reasonably low level-it can intercept USB events directly, control local devices, and even automate your mouse and keyboard. Mostly, it’s just a menubar app that runs Lua scripts and extends system actions to those scripts through its API. Hammerspoon is probably the closest you’ll get to AutoHotKey for macOS. Hammerspoon: Control Your System with Lua It follows the same scheme of triggers and actions and supports running Applescript and Automator workflows as actions.

It’s similar to BetterTouchTool but more streamlined, and with simpler triggers and actions.

Keyboard Maestro is a simple app that gets its job done: automating your system with macros and hotkeys.

However, there is a small issue with this shortcut: if I have several apps open, no matter which app's red X I click with two fingers, the shortcut is triggered for the active app (for example, two-finger clicking the red X of the Messages app may trigger the CMD-Q shortcut in Safari, if Safari is currently active).Keyboard Maestro: Dead Simple Custom Hotkeys I set it up so that clicking the red X with one finger does the default action (close the window) and clicking the red X with two fingers = CMD-Q. I decided to change that with the help of BTT. Coming from Windows, I was surprised to find out that most of the time, clicking the red X button closes the window instead of quitting an app.

Bettertouchtool tnt