Macronaut → TinyTask alternative
A TinyTask alternative that lets you edit the recording
TinyTask is thirty-odd kilobytes that record what you do and play it back, and for twenty years that has been enough for a lot of people. The wall everyone eventually hits is the same one: a recording is a sealed box. When one click in the middle is wrong, there is nothing to open — you record the whole thing again.
Why a recording breaks
A replayed recording sends the same clicks at the same screen coordinates in roughly the same rhythm. That works exactly as long as the screen is identical. Then one of these happens:
- The window opens somewhere else, and every coordinate is now pointing at whatever moved into that spot.
- Something loads more slowly than the day you recorded it, so the click lands before the button exists.
- The display scaling or resolution changed — a different monitor, a laptop undocked — and every coordinate is off by a ratio.
- You need it to stop when something appears, and a recording has no way to notice anything.
None of these are bugs. They are what replaying coordinates means. The fix is not a better recorder, it is a recording you can open and change.
The same job, both ways
TinyTask
Press record, do the thing, press stop. Press
play to repeat it. Set a repeat count, or save it as a standalone
.exe.
To change a step: record it again from the beginning.
To make it wait for something: not possible.
Macronaut
Press record, do the thing, press stop. What you did is now a list of steps on a canvas — click here, type that, wait 400 ms.
To change a step: double-click it and change it. Reorder, delete, add a loop around part of it.
To make it wait: drop in a wait-for-image or wait-for-text step and wire it in.
Side by side
| TinyTask | Macronaut | |
|---|---|---|
| Records input | Yes | Yes |
| Edit what you recorded | No | Yes — every step, individually |
| See what a macro contains | No | Yes, it is a diagram |
| Wait for something on screen | No | Image, on-screen text via OCR, or a pixel |
| Branch on what it finds | No | Yes |
| Plain auto clicker | Via a recorded click | Yes, it is the window it opens on |
| Save as a standalone .exe | Yes | No |
| Download size | Tens of KB | 78 MB |
| Installer needed | No | No |
| Input that games accept | Standard injection | Three backends, including a kernel driver |
| Price | Free | Free |
What TinyTask still does better
Two real things, and they are not small:
- Size and speed of starting. It is a few dozen kilobytes. It opens instantly, it fits on anything, and it asks nothing of the machine. Macronaut is 78 MB because it carries a whole user-interface toolkit, and that is a genuine cost with nothing clever to say about it.
- Compiling a macro to a standalone executable. Handing someone a single file that just runs, on a machine with nothing installed, is genuinely useful and Macronaut cannot do it.
There is also something to be said for a tool that has done one thing, the same way, for two decades.
What Macronaut does better
- The recording is editable. This is the whole point. One wrong click is one step to fix, not a re-record.
- It can wait, and it can look. Wait for an image, wait for text to appear using Windows’ own OCR, wait for a pixel to change — which is what turns a brittle replay into something that survives a slow morning.
- It can decide. Branches and loops with real conditions, rather than one sequence at a fixed speed.
- You can read it later. A script is a diagram with labels. In six months you will still know what it does, which is not true of a recording file.
- It is also a plain auto clicker. The window it opens on is interval, button, count, Start — no recording involved.
Which one should you use?
Stay with TinyTask if the macro already works, if the size matters to you, or if you need to hand somebody a self-contained executable.
Try Macronaut if you have recorded the same sequence more than twice, if a macro keeps breaking when a window moves, or if what you actually need is “wait until that appears, then carry on” — which no recorder can do, however good the recording is.
Trying it
A single 78 MB file for Windows 10 and 11. No installer, no account, and every feature is free.
Windows will say “Windows protected your PC” on first run. It says that for any app without a signing certificate — click More info, then Run anyway.
Also worth comparing: Macronaut against AutoHotkey, if writing a script is on the table.
TinyTask is not my software and I have no connection to it. If something here is out of date or unfair, tell me and I will change it — gerbenvanpoucke0@gmail.com.