After watching movies like the Harry Potter series, I often dream about having a magic wand using which I can make my spoon stir my coffee or tea on its own. But magic is only seen in movies and books, so the closest I could come to the wand is Ghost Mouse. It is a freeware software using which you can record and play your keystrokes and mouse clicks. When you play the recorded events, it appears like things are happening magically.
You can download GhostMouse from its website. The download is available as an installable application. The downloaded setup file is less than 1 megabytes in size. After the installation, it places an icon in the Windows’ system tray. You can double-click on this icon to open the very small window of the Ghost Mouse.
The tiny Ghost Mouse window is completely bloat free. It has only two buttons – record and play. To start recording the keystrokes and mouse clicks, click on the record button or press the F10 on your keyboard. To stop recording, you have to press F10 again or click on the stop-recording button.
For playing back the recording, you can either click on the play button or press the hotkey Ctrl + F12. Just like with the recording, you have to use the same hotkey for stopping the playback or click on the stop button.
GhostMouse also allows you to save the recording in form of a file. You can save the recording to a file by selecting File → Save from the menubar. Later when you want to play this recording, you can open it by selecting the file through File → Open in the GhostMouse menubar.
In the GhostMouse settings, you can change the playback speed – you can slow down the speed or make it play faster. You can choose to which events you want to record – you have the options to select keystrokes, mouse clicks, mouse movement and the delay between the events. You can assign different hotkeys for playback and record. You can choose to automatically run GhostMouse at Windows startup. You can select what to do when playback is over – stay idle (do nothing), turn off PC, log off, hibernate PC etc.
These settings can be accessed from different sub-menus in the GhostMouse window, which is very annoying. It would be better if they had put all the options in one window so you could change all settings from one place. But otherwise, GhostMouse is an excellent software to record and play a sequence of keyboard and mouse input events.
You can download GhostMouse from http://www.ghost-mouse.com/.