During a recent conversation with my friends, they introduced me to an application that can bring mechanical keyboard sounds to a Mac. Intrigued by the idea of how adding sound feedback can enhance the typing experience, I decided to create a Keyboard Maestro macro to replicate this feature.
Creating the macro turned out to be fairly simple. By utilizing the “This string is typed” trigger and entering the regular expression [a-zA-Z0-9\r\n\s], the macro can play a mechanical sound every time a key is pressed. Remember to uncheck the “simulate matching deletes before executing” option to prevent the macro from interfering with keystrokes.
The most challenging aspect of this project was finding a suitable keyboard sound to use. A quick search for “mechanical keyboard sound” should provide access to websites where sound effects can be downloaded for free.1
One advantage of using Keyboard Maestro for this task is that it eliminates the need to grant additional permissions to another app to access keystrokes. I guess it’s better from the privacy perspective.
You can search for “mixkit-hard-single-key-press-in-a-laptop-2542” which is the sound I’m using in the macro. ↩