Elgato’s Stream Deck has been around for quite some time on the market, and the company has slowly been adding features to make it more viable for mainstream users. Having used the new Stream Deck Neo for the better part of two weeks, I can safely say that this particular product has come a long way since the original one that debuted back in 2017. It’s a great accessory that works well as advertised, but it’s still a niche product that’s not necessarily a must-have for everyone, especially since you can achieve most of what it does with a simple macro pad.
In fact, I just set up a humble macro pad to replicate some — if not all — my automations on a Mac. There are plenty of ways to achieve this, but here’s how I used a simple and easy-to-use utility on Mac to ditch the Stream Deck and embrace the simplicity of macro pad for my own workflow.
What are the prerequisites
What you’ll need to replace your Stream Deck
- A macro pad of your choice. You can either pick up a pre-built macro pad from Amazon and other retailers like Drop, or build one for yourself from scratch, too.
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EPOMAKER EK21
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Megalodon triple knob macro pad
- ‘Keyboard Maestro’ utility to create macros and automations on Mac. This is a paid utility that comes with a free trial to check out, but you can also consider free alternatives like ‘Karabiner-Elements’ on Mac, or ‘AutoHotKey’ on Windows. Keyboard Maestro is fairly easy to set up and use thanks to its intuitive UI, but other alternatives aren’t as expansive and may ask you to write and execute some scripts manually.
Get Keyboard Maestro
How to use a macro pad as a Stream Deck
A step-by-step guide to use Keyboard Maestro
Using the Keyboard Maestro, as I previously mentioned, is fairly simple, and it’ll only take you a few minutes to set everything up and get started. I’ve highlighted the steps to set up one of my automations that opens three of my frequently visited websites on Google Chrome, along with Slack and Spotify.
- Connect your macro pad or your desired keyboard to your system.
- Launch Keyboard Maestro.
- Click the + button located at the bottom of the second column.
- Assign a name to the shortcut you’re about to create, and click New Trigger.
- Select the Hot Key Triggerand press the desired key on either your macro pad or the keyboard.
This could either be a single key or even a combination of multiple keys.
- Click New Action to assign what happens when you hit your Hot Key Trigger.
- Select your desired action from the list that populates on the left column.
- Exit the app.
And that’s how easy it is to use the Keyboard Maestro on Mac to create custom automations to trigger using your macro pad. You don’t necessarily have to create a multi-action automation, as the utility will let you perform a single task, too. For instance, I’ve assigned one of the keys on my macro pad to trigger the screenshot utility on Mac. Everything from creating a calendar event to switching tabs or even deleting a file from your Mac is well within the reach of Keyboard Maestro, so it’s safe to say that you can replicate most of your Stream Deck automations and assign your shortcuts and toggles on a macro pad or even your keyboard with this utility.
You may have to spend some time initially to set up all your shortcuts on this utility, but it’s a one-and-done setup that you don’t have to worry about doing again in the future, and it’s well worth the effort, in my opinion. Alternatively, you can also use utilities like QMK and VIA to set custom macros, but it is worth noting that not all keyboards or macro pads support these utilities, and you may have to get custom JSON files to get them working.
Related
How to configure QMK keyboards using VIA
VIA and QMK streamline keyboard customization, enabling easy remapping, macro setups, and layer management for a tailored typing experience.
Using the humble macro pad as a viable Stream Deck alternative
Using a macro pad as an alternative to the Stream Deck, as you can tell, is fairly simple. All you really need is a reliable utility like Keyboard Maestro to set things up, and you should be good to go. A macro pad — or pretty much any keyboard — is fit to run shortcuts for specific apps like OBS out of the box thanks to manual setup, but you will have to rely on a third-party utility like this to get automations to streamline your workflow. It’s not necessarily a bad thing considering how inexpensive macro pads really are, and also how setting up all automations and getting everything working is almost like a DIY project in itself.