How to view an applications actions in command line?

Question

I have a series of highly repetitive tasks that require a tremendous number of button / menu clicks that I've been trying to automate. I have successfully automated the process with Automator using bash mouse clicks x,y coordinates. However, because this is method requires pixel coordinates it only works on one of my machines because the others do not have the same display size. As such this solution is lacking.
What i'm looking for (and struggling to find) is means of viewing any running application's action as an equivalent text command. This is a built in functionality in most 3D modeling programs like Maya, Blender, etc. (which is where I first started using this method of automating tedious processes). Having the ability to view any button click or menu selection as a text based command, makes sorting out the proper syntax to create a proper script infinity easier.
As an example, I want to be shown something like:
tell application "Finder" to launch "Safari"      When clicking on the safari dock icon
tell application "Safari" to open location "http://www.google.com/"     When typing in the URL and pressing enter
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "apple support"    When typing the text string into google's search bar
Though the above example is applescript, I'll take any language if it gets me heading int he right direction.  :-)
Side note though Automator's 'watch me' do is great for simple tasks, I found it to be unreliable given the number of steps I have to deal with. 

Answer 1

You might check with your apps' developers to see if they support AppleScript, Automator, or other scripting languages that might be used for this. Some programs have built-in macro and scripting options that can be set up in a built-in editor or run in a built-in command-line environment of sorts, while others supply libraries for external scripting with AppleScript and others.
As for live tracing of a program's commands, most that you use will be coded in a low level language like C, C++, Java, or Objective-C, which are compiled and run in binary machine code as opposed to an interpreted language (one that does not need compiling to run), as is the case with most scripting languages (shell scripts, AppleScript, Matlab, etc.).
For the most part, the only options you have for "tracing" a program's functions are to monitor output that it might log to the console. You can see this by opening the console, but the output here is diagnostic in nature and is programmatically limited to what the programmers have intended be output (ie, things like warnings and errors, as opposed to every action the program is taking). You can also use the Terminal to directly launch a program's executable so it is hosted in the Terminal shell. This will give you direct access to all of the program's output, as opposed to that only intended for logging in the Console, but it is still not the same as a full output of the commands and routines the program is performing.
Some of Apple's developer tools can allow you to better monitor a program's functions, but these are intended for developers, and have some requirements, and will not allow you to use any results for productivity automation.