I am just in exploring phase. Did not sit down seriously to complete all the details to move over from Q&A to Sesame yet.  For me, automation is very important as all day I have to repeat the same routine repeatedly. I translated a few database files and came to conclusion that translation is not going to be any problem. What left is to automate the application and merge related applications (databases from Q&A) that need to interact often.

Looking at Macros in Sesame for automation was very discouraging.  It is highly unreliable as the pre-requisite to run the macro successfully is to have the same set up of the tree and other parts of application  as when macro was recorded!!  If one of the trees is collapsed or enlarged, it going to be unpredictable at the best and destructive at the worst.  I did not like the idea of recording the mouse movement and clicks at all. 

Four pages of Documentation of Macros in user guide gave me the idea as to how important macros are going to be in the scope of application development in Sesame.  Most of us here are coming from Q&A for Dos background, where macros is the only way one could automate anything and thinking any other way is kind of anxiety provoking for Q&A users.  Don't we all remember the early demise of Q&A because of its failure to incorporate macros in the windows version? Well, that is what I thought.

But looking at Sesame programming, I am not missing Macros  at all, definitely not in the GUI environment. One can practically do anything and everything after entering a form with programming, what one could do with Macros. So, what left is before you enter the form, that is where macro might play a little role in the present form.

Programming sound intimidating at first for the non-programmer users and neophytes like myself but in Sesame the programming syntax are simple and with debugging tool in the form of writeln feedback window, you take one step at a time until you complete the whole routine. What's more,  there are only a few functions that you have to learn for automation namely, @SelectTreeItem, @Load(saved_spec) in the most part and a few others like @save, @exit etc.. to a lesser extent.

I am posting this with hope that others will share their experiences & insight and it might encourage others to explore this important dimension of application development namely, automation.

Mark, since you know the best, we need to experiment with Macros before writing them off.  Sorry for jumping to conclusion.  Thank you.

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High on that list for me is the ability to manually edit macros.

Sometimes you just need to go in and look at the steps in a macro to remind you exactly what it is doing.  I have macros that were created so long ago that I've forgotten precisely how they are accomplishing the task I set them up for.

PS: A pause for user input (like Q&A has) within a macro is also desirable.

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All of them will take Sesame to altogether different level. And yes, let us not forget about the inbuilt, well integrated word processor (need not be real fancy). Thank you guys and gals of the Sesame development team. I knew that constant improvement and innovation will chart the further course of development of Sesame.  

I definetely like the ability to manually edit macros. In Q&A for DOS I hand wrote about 80% of the macros I used - it allows me to neatly format them and block them logically.

One other feature I'd recommend adding at some point is colourizing the text in the programming windows based on the code (ie if statements are blue, numbers are red, etc. although its probably a huge undertaking, comments being green). This makes it much easier to debug and develop.

You can invoke a macro on startup using the -macro command line switch:

sesame -macro macro12.mac Customers.db

Of course you can put the command line in the "Target" of an icon. If you want to customize per application, make an icon ("shortcut") for each "customized" application. This can make things a lot easier for newcomers than building a custom form that loads different apps.