A free alternative to a mouse and keyboard recorder

For a free choice, try Macro by Zaweba, a mouse and keyboard recorder for Windows. It records clicks, double-clicks, drags with their path, scrolling in both directions and keystrokes, along with the time between them, and replays them whenever you like. Unlike many recorders, it shows the result as plain English steps you can read and change.

It's free software under the Zaweba licence agreement, works offline and needs no account.

What a mouse and keyboard recorder does

The idea is simple and has been around for a long time. You press record, do a job by hand, and stop. The tool notes every mouse and keyboard event and can play them back, so a dull, repeated job can be done for you. Many such tools show the recording as a long list of raw events or hide it altogether, which makes it hard to fix a single wrong click.

How Macro by Zaweba does the core job

Press Ctrl+Alt+R from any program, or the Record button. The main window steps aside and a small bar at the top of the screen counts events, with Pause keystrokes and Stop buttons. Clicks on the bar are never recorded.

The recording becomes steps such as Click left at 512, 300, Type "hello", Key Ctrl+S and Wait 500 ms. Ordinary typing becomes one Type step using your keyboard layout, with the UK pound sign included. Shortcuts become Key steps. Ctrl or Shift held around clicks becomes Hold down and Let go, and wheel notches merge into one Scroll step.

Mouse movement between clicks is left out by default, which keeps the steps short. Tick Record mouse moves if a job needs it, and every movement is kept, sampled every 15 ms.

Where it goes further than recording

Editing is the part people notice. You can add clicks, typing, key combinations, waits, scrolls, moves, button presses and notes by hand, edit a step with Enter or a double-click, move steps with Alt+Up and Alt+Down, duplicate with Ctrl+D and delete with Del. To set a position you can point at the spot, and the editor reads the cursor after three seconds. Macro > Record and insert into this macro adds a new recording after any step.

Replays run at 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x or with No delays, a set number of times, until stopped or once per row of a CSV or TXT file. Each macro can have its own hotkey, such as Ctrl+Alt+1, and clashes with other macros or other programs are refused with a reason.

Positions relative to the active window keep clicks on target after a window moves. ZawebaMacro.exe --play runs a macro unattended, and Schedule by Zaweba uses that to run macros on a timetable.

Safety you'd want from any recorder

A countdown, 3 seconds by default, comes before each replay so you can click into the right window. Holding Esc for one second stops any replay at any speed and releases any key or mouse button the macro was holding.

Typed text, including passwords, is stored as plain text, and Macro says so before your first recording, in the editor and on export. A hotkey, Ctrl+Alt+P by default, pauses keystroke recording while you type something private.

What it isn't

Macro by Zaweba is a recorder with an editor, not a programming tool. There's no scripting language, so it doesn't make decisions such as checking what's on screen before acting. For the jobs recorders are usually bought for, such as forms, repeated menus and data entry from a list, that's rarely missed, and the readable steps make it much easier to keep a macro working.