What’s a Macro?
Macros simply refer to automating repetitive tasks. According Sal Soghoian, an automation expert at Apple, macros make your work “faster, simpler, and more accurate.” And while they are, under the hood, based on programming, you needn’t read, write, or understand any of it because I’ve already done the programming for you. You simply need to install the macro software and then load the Caesar macros. The whole process shouldn’t take long at all. Plus, all of the software and macros are completely free. And if you’d like to modify those macros, Chapter 9 show you painless ways to do so.
Windows
Probably the best macro software available for Windows is AutoHotkey. It is powerful, flexible, open-source, and free. It is also the envy of many Mac and Linux users, not least because of its
extensive online support community. In a way, AutoHotkey works like Microsoft Word in that both ultimately process files. While in Word that file is called a document, in AutoHotkey, it’s called a script. For Caesar, you’ll only use one such script: the file you download from this book’s website, such as Windows-Caesar-Macros-With-Evernote.ahk (the .ahk extension stands for AutoHotkey).
First, install
AutoHotkey . To run Caesar macros, open the appropriate link below.
Mac
Now let’s turn to macros on the Mac. Setting up macros on Mac is somewhat like making spaghetti. It’s not really hard, provided you have the ingredients and follow the instructions. As explained in Chapter 9, make sure you've got
cliclick and
Quicksilver so that you can use these macros.
Linux
There are, of course, many kinds of desktop Linux and Unix varieties, including Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mageia, and Fuduntu. This book cannot cover them all, so it will instead focus on one of the most popular distributions: Ubuntu. However, if you prefer another distribution, no problem! Since you’re probably familiar with installing software on your flavor of Linux, the instructions below should need only minor adjustments to work on your system.
For macros in Linux, Caesar suggests Autokey. Autokey is arguably the best free, open-source macro software (FOSS) for Linux. Perhaps this is because it relies upon one of the most widely-loved programming languages for any platform: Python.
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