Back in February of 2020, I was involved in a bicycle accident and broke my hand 🤕.
Ouch!
Don’t worry, the hand is fine, the bike is fine, and so is the dog…
During my recovery, I was fortunate enough to be able to continue working with one good hand. What I lacked in speed, I made up for in perseverance (and hours). That was enough to get me through my most of my responsibilities… but not all…
One of my responsibilities a developer advocate is that I put together developer materials like videos and screencasts, some of them involve text being entered being typed. I was never that great or consistent at typing with two hands, and there was no way I was going to be able to do this with one hand. So I started thinking instead.
What if I could get someone else to type for me? Better yet, what if there was some software I could use to type for me? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that did what I needed it to do. The thing that came closest was AppleScript.
Which is where I started.
Some of limitations that I encountered were:
- AppleScript the language was very foreign to me, however, AppleScript automation supports JavaScript (which is what I ended up using),
- The APIs to send keys aren’t documented very well and resources were hard to come by, and
- Sending individual keystrokes using the API was very onerous and required many, many keystrokes.
I thought knew I could do better. So I did what any self-respecting software engineer would do. I wrote a console
application named sendkeys-macos and published it to
npm.
npm install sendkeys-macos --global
With this tool, I created an abstraction that would send keystrokes to a given macOS application. It supports a typing at a constant rate, inserting arbitrary pauses between keystrokes, and modifier key combinations.
Check out the following example:
sendkeys -a "Notes" -c "Hello<p:1> world<c:left:option,shift><c:i:command>"
The library also supports input from a text file or stdin. Check it out on
GitHub.
I would have never sat down to write this library if it wasn’t for the broken hand. With two hands, my typing was slow and error prone enough to be a source of frustration, but not bad enough to do something about it. Thanks to the bike accident, it became bad enough to do something about. And now, my typing speed and accuracy has never been better.
Checkout a longer example below:
Look Ma, I’m integrating Google Pay into a Vue application! I’m doing
it so fast!