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A Comprehensive Guide to
Keyboard Maestro (Start Saving
Time Today)
Mike Schmitz
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In this article, we’ll introduce you to Keyboard Maestro and show you some
of the awesome things you can do with it to automate your Mac and become
#AsianEfficent.
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If you don’t already have it, you can download Keyboard Maestro here.
Let’s walk through creating your first macro in Keyboard Maestro together:
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4. Click the “+ New Trigger” button and select “Wireless Network Trigger”
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5. Type the name of your wireless network or select it from the drop down
menu and select “Is Connected” for the state
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8. Select the app you want to launch when you connect to your work WiFi
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(e.g., “HipChat”)
Note that if you use web apps, you can do the same thing with web apps by
selecting the “Open a URL” action (useful for things like JIRA or Basecamp).
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put Keybaord Maestro to work for you, but you’ll really start to see the
benefits when you customize this to fit into your specific workflow.
The key question you need you ask yourself before implementing Keyboard
Maestro into your workflow is:
Hot Key – this trigger will execute the macro when a specific keyboard
combination is pressed, regardless of the application that is open at the
time. This is the most common way to execute a macro in Keyboard
Maestro.
Macro Palette Entry – this trigger will execute the macro when it’s
selected from the floating Macro Palette. The Macro Palette will only
appear when the macro is available to be run, meaning that if you have
Keyboard Maestro set to ignore certain applications, the floating Macro
Palette may not appear.
Status Menu Item – this trigger will execute the macro when selected
from a dropdown menu that’s accessible by clicking on the Keyboard
Maestro status bar menu icon in the upper-right corner of your screen.
Typed String – this trigger will execute the macro when a specific
keyboard string is pressed. This is different than a hot key because the
keys do not all need to be pressed at the same time.
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Application – this trigger will execute the macro when the selected
application achieves a certain state. The available states are launches,
quits, is running, activates, deactivates, and is active.
System Clipboard – this trigger will execute the macro whenever the
system clipboard changes.
Engine Launch – this trigger will execute a macro when the Keyboard
Maestro engine launches. Typically this would be used on system
startup, but it could also be when you quit and relaunch the Keyboard
Maestro engine for any reason.
Focussed Window – this trigger will execute the macro whenever the
focussed window status changes to match the identified criteria. There
are four variables you can use with this trigger: changes, title changes,
window’s title changes, and window’s frame changes.
Folder this trigger executes a macro whenever the contents of the
identified folder change. You can set it so that the macro runs either
when a file is added to the folder or when a file is removed.
Login – this trigger executes a macro when you log in to your computer
(assuming that the Keyboard Maestro is set to launch at login, which
can be configured by checking the “Launch Engine at Login” option
under the General preference pane).
MIDI Note – perhaps the strangest trigger, this executes a macro
whenever a a specific MIDI note is played via a MIDI device (like an
electronic keyboard). You can set the macro to execute when the note is
pressed (note on), released (note off), or continuously held down.
Volume – this trigger executes a macro whenever a specific network
volume is either mounted or unmounted, depending on your setting.
Periodically While Logged In – this trigger executes a macro
periodically while the User is logged in. This can be useful when
performing routine maintenance tasks or tracking changes.
Public Web Entry is Executed – WARNING: this one is a little
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Action!
The second thing you have to identify when creating a Keyboard Maestro
macro is what you want the macro to do. This is called the “Action.” While
there are too many actions supported by Keyboard Maestro to list them all
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Application Control – these are actions that you can use to Activate,
Show, Hide, Switch, or Quit specific applications.
Clipboard – these are actions that allow you manipulate the system
clipboard, named clipboards, and clipboard history.
Control Flow – these are actions that manipulate the flow of the
macro, like pausing/waiting to complex if/then statements.
Debugger – these are actions that allow you to observe and control the
individual steps of a macro while you are working on it.
Execute – these are actions that execute scripts, other macros, or
Automator workflows.
File – these are actions that manipulate files by moving, copying,
duplicating, trashing, or deleting files or folders.
Google Chrome Control – these are actions that control Google
Chrome, like opening windows or tabs and interacting with web pages.
Image – these are actions that manipulate image files, like flipping,
rotating, or resizing.
Interface Control – these are actions that allow you to interact with
the User Interface by selecting menu options, pressing keystrokes, or
manipulating your pointing device.
iTunes Control – these are actions that control iTunes playback like
play/pause, skip, rate, etc.
Keyboard Maestro – these are actions that control how Keyboard
Maestro behaves.
Mail Control – these are actions that allow you to send messages or set
flags in Apple Mail.
MIDI – these are actions that send MIDI messages to your computer
(e.g., note on/off).
Notifications – these are actions that provide feedback via a
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If you want to know more about a specific action, check out the Keyboard
Maestro wiki, which provides detailed explanations of each one.
If all of this seems like a lot, don’t worry! You don’t need to know what
actions are available; you can tell Keyboard Maestro to just watch how you
interact with your Mac, and it will add the actions to the macro
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Recording is the easiest way to create a new macro, but here are a couple
other example macros to give you a few ideas about how Keyboard Maestro
might work for you.
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It’s possible to manipulate this entire process using keyboard shortcuts. For
example, the Tab key switches fields and typing [] in Confluence will create a
checkbox. What I did (based on Thanh’s example) is create a Keyboard
Maestro macro that types all of these keystrokes in quick succession, so I can
just trigger the macro and then the whole process is handled automatically.
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Believe it or not, there actually isn’t a Mac keyboard shortcut to hide all
windows and show your desktop. You can kind of do this through using a hot
corner, but it doesn’t really hide all the windows and instead just
temporarily moves them out of the way. The best way to do this before
Keyboard Maestro was to combine two separate keyboard shortcuts:
With Keyboard Maestro, you can actually accomplish this with the built-in
window management actions.
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Thanh and I talked about this on a recent podcast episode, but I don’t install
the Adobe Flash Player on my Mac because it is the biggest security hole for
Macs to get viruses and malware. In addition, it’s slow and burns up your
battery faster because Flash is a resource hog. Since I use Safari as my
default web browser because it’s handoff-enabled with my iOS devices, that
means I need to either install the Flash Player plugin or use a different
browser (like Chrome) that has built-in Flash support.
Fortunately, most websites no longer are built on Flash, but occasionally I’ll
come across a site that requires Flash to be installed in order to be
functional. In these instances, I use Google Chrome to view the page. It
takes time, though, to copy the URL of the site I’m on, open Chrome, and
then paste the URL into the Chrome address bar.
With Keyboard Maestro, I can launch a macro via a hotkey combination that
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#4: HTML-to-Markdown
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This may seem backwards, but it comes in handy in our Asian Efficiency
workflows because there are actually two versions of every email we send
out: the HTML version and the plain-text version. The Plain text version
uses Markdown-style formatting to indicate where the headers, links, etc.
should be as it is much more human-readable than HTML. This macro
allows us to take the completed HTML email and generate the plain-text
version easily.
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There are many advantages to using plain text, and I try to use it everywhere
I can. However, there will still be times when you copy text (from a
webpage, for example) and you go to paste into another program (like
Keynote), and instead of getting text that matches the look and feel of what
you’ve already typed, you get gigantic, bold text that looks terrible. In these
instances, what you want to do is not just paste, but paste without style. This
will paste the text without the formatting data and instead match what
you’re already using.
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The only problem with PopClip is that the menu doesn’t appear when you
make a keyboard selection, and sometimes you can dismiss it accidentally.
When this happens, you normally have to re-select the text to get the menu
to appear again, but Brett Terpstra has created a simple script that causes the
PopClip menu to appear. With Keyboard Maestro, I’ve set this script to a
hotkey trigger, so I can open it at will.
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If you use OmniFocus, you probably (hopefully) use the Quick Entry
shortcut to add tasks to OmniFocus easily from your Mac. If you do, chances
are that you’ve tried to invoke the Quick Entry window using your keyboard
shortcut of choice and realized after a couple seconds that nothing was
happening, because OmniFocus wasn’t open. Shawn Blanc has written a
script to fix this called Oopsie Focus that launches OmniFocus and opens
the Quick Entry window automatically to fix this specific problem.
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macros, which you can download from the Keyboard Maestro forum.
MacStories has several articles about using Keyboard Maestro
(including the one by TJ Luoma on creating the QuickCursor
replacement I mentioned earlier).
My Easy Buttons has a YouTube playlist that really gets into some
advanced features (although his narration style is, shall we say, an
acquired taste).
This article is a bit older, but it has some great, detailed explanations of
macros.
You can find tons of useful macros over at the Keyboard Maestro
forums.
If for some reason you don’t have Keyboard Maestro yet, you can get get
it here.
Conclusion
Keyboard Maestro is a very powerful automation tool, and hopefully you
have a better idea of how you can make it work for you. A lot of our Dojo
members (our productivity community) uses Keyboard Maestro and have
shared their own macros over at The Dojo forum. If you have any awesome
macros you’d like to share, let us know in the comments!
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