Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community. If you’re a current user of KM, you’re in for a few treats. Keyboard Maestro has an extensive library of actions that can be. Stairways Software released its 9.0 update of Keyboard Maestro (KM), the granddaddy of all Mac automation applications. If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Use Keyboard Maestro to quickly access OmniFocus features and. If you want to automate actions on your Mac, especially if you never want to write a line of AppleScript or any other code, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Keyboard Maestro costs $36 and there’s a free trial. But its power can’t be denied, and its ability to find specific items on the screen has solved several automation problems that I thought were unsolvable. Keyboard Maestro’s interface could use a refresh-it still drives me batty that I can’t leave its library of Actions open all the time, and that they appear in a slide-up pane that covers my library of macros. At which point I can run the rest of the macro using keyboard shortcuts and menu items. But Keyboard Maestro will match my sample image against the contents of the screen, find the right area, and then click on it. To do this, I’ve taken a screenshot of that session to use as the example:ĭepending on the placement of the window and the number of sessions in Audio Hijack, that block could be anywhere. This set of commands looks on my screen to see if a particular Audio Hijack session appears in the app’s Sessions window, and if it does, it clicks on it. Here’s a portion of a Keyboard Maestro macro of mine: Keyboard Maestro has an answer: it looks at your screen for you, finds what it’s looking for, and lets you act on it. And if that thing isn’t in the exact same place on the screen every time, how can you automate it? Something you would probably use your human eyes and human brain to find. But sometimes you can’t avoid needing to automate clicking on a something specific on the screen. And you can do an awful lot with those features. It’ll open apps, move and resize windows, emulate keystrokes and simulate the pulling down of menu items. Keyboard Maestro does a zillion different things, including most of the things you can think of. I’ve been meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro for a while now, because what it does is nothing short of amazing. It owes its power to some mind-boggling methods, like emulating keyboard shortcuts, invoking menu items, and monitoring what’s displayed on the screen itself. Automation programs Keyboard Maestro and Alfred, among others, can power up your Mac workflow and productivity by reducing the need to perform redundant tasks. Keyboard Maestro has been the solution to almost every this-seems-impossible problem I’ve encountered on my Mac. In my recent piece about automation on macOS and iOS, I mentioned the witchcraft that is possible on the Mac with Keyboard Maestro: Note: This story has not been updated since 2021. It debuts today with an introductory price of just $24.Keyboard Maestro’s most mind-blowing feature (And should you want more, don David Sparks’s has several other Field Guides, including: Siri Shortcuts, OmniFocus, iPhone, Hazel, and Paperless.Ĭheck out The MacSparky Keyboard Maestro Field Guide. If you’re interested in creating automated triggers, actions, palettes, or useful scripts, MacSparky’s Keyboard Maestro Field Guide is for you. And if anyone can turn you into a macOS wizard, it’s Sparks.ĭavid’s latest field guide highlights everything Keyboard Maestro can do and includes almost 4 hours of video training and 76 separate videos to help you master all of Keyboard Maestro’s intricacies. What also makes it great is that all these scripts and macros are based on a graphical user interface - you don’t have to do any actual coding to use it, you just have to know what problem you want a solution for.ĭavid Sparks’s expertise in this category is unparalleled. ( Here’s that KM macro if you’re interested.) Perhaps my favorite use for Keyboard Maestro is to eliminate one of the single biggest frustrations I encounter when using my Mac: hitting a keyboard shortcut to launch a quick-entry to my todo list, but realize that my todo list is not currently running. And that’s just the tip of the Keyboard Maestro iceberg. Or to Launch Tweetbot in a moment’s notice (not my most productive shortcut). I also have a shortcut to open Safari URLs in Chrome. One thing you can use Keyboard Maestro for is to apply global keyboard shortcuts that can then be used to trigger just about any sort of macro, action, or script that you want.įor example, I have a hotkey set to launch Mail upon a particular keystroke. Keyboard Maestro is one of the most powerful and awesome apps available for the Mac.
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