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.

  1. You can search for “mixkit-hard-single-key-press-in-a-laptop-2542” which is the sound I’m using in the macro. ↩︎