Recording keystrokes or pasting text in the Multitouch app

Sometimes you have tedious tasks that require you to just input the same text in a ton of different places, and copy paste just isn’t enough. There’s now two options in Multitouch that can help you out: Keystroke Recording & Paste Text. Both of these options can be tied to either a gesture or a keyboard shortcut.

If you’ve used the app before, configuring either of these should be rather straightforward. They can both be selected under the Shortcut & Key Entry category. For Keystroke Recording, start by selecting the text area that appears, then input keystrokes on the keyboard. For Paste Text, just put the text you want into the text area.

A few things to know for Keystroke Recording

When entering keystrokes, you’ll just need to be aware that this is not normal text entry — it will record every keystroke including backspaces.

Additionally, modifier flags are recorded, even though you don’t see them displayed in the text area. This means that it could act as a sort of compound keyboard shortcut recorder, although that’s not the intended purpose. Another thing to keep in mind is that the recorded keystrokes will be played back without time delay, regardless of the time you take while entering keystrokes. If you execute your configured gesture/shortcut for the keystroke recorder, you’ll notice that all of the keystrokes are played back sequentially rather than all at once.

Why are there two options, and when do I choose one over the other?

I initially created the Keystroke Recorder to avoid manipulating the global pasteboard in macOS, and the Keystroke Recorder is a little more flexible in that it can take into account modifier keys. After using the DeepL app for inputting text translations, I realized that manipulating the pasteboard wasn’t so bad after all. So, if you just want text pasted in somewhere, go for the Paste Text action. If you have some very specific use cases where modifier keys matter, go for the Keystroke Recorder.