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Keyboard maestro.5/8/2023 ![]() (1-2 business day processing time + 3-9 business days delivery) PLDHL (1-2 business day processing time + 1-5 business days delivery) Peter N Lewis, the creator of my favorite Mac app, Keyboard Maestro, sent me an email - I thought it was just one of the newsletter emails, then I read it - an invite to test out ()Īt this moment the heavens opened up and the sun shown on me brightly through the Seattle rain.DEDHL (1-2 business day processing time + 2-7 business days delivery) KEYBOARD MAESTRO CREATE FOLDER WITH VARIABLES MAC Why do I tell you this: so that you, the reader, know that this review is written by a huge Keyboard Maestro fanboy - HUGE. ![]() I really, truly, struggle to define what Keyboard Maestro (‘KM’) does for most computer users. It isn’t a tool for the ‘average’ user, it is a tool for people who don’t like repetition, a tool for people who want speed. ![]() There’s a learning curve to the app, but it’s not insurmountable. If I find myself doing the same repetitive task over and over, there stands a good chance that I can automate that action with KM, saving me a lot of time. You can do so much more though, that even such a miraculous sounding statement is not doing KM justice. Best just to tell you some of the things that I use KM for. – Snap a screenshot using Acorn instead of the Mac’s built in tools. – Set a click delay on the mouse so I can walk to the printer and load envelopes, then the print button is clicked. ![]() – Connect to a WebDAV server via keyboard in Finder. – Mail the currently selected file with a specific email account (more on this later). – Launch various AppleScripts with keyboard shortcuts. – Check OmniFocus at certain times for unprocessed items in the ‘inbox’. – Running various Automator workflows with a keyboard shortcut. – Center Reeder every time I switch to it. – Create a link blog post (more on this in a bit). – Grab current Safari URL and add it to the clipboard as a markdown formatted link with current window title as the linked text. – Resize my Safari window to my preferred size. – () (I am forever accidentally moving that window). – Send current Writer document to TextMate for posting. That’s 30 things that I use KM for almost everyday and it’s not even all the macros that I have set up. With the release of () the software gains the following very awesome features (only the highlights as I see them): It is crazy to think how much tedious work this program has saved me and I am forever thankful for it. KEYBOARD MAESTRO CREATE FOLDER WITH VARIABLES SOFTWARE If you aren’t a KM junkie that list may seem pretty underwhelming, but I assure you that the second item on that list is huge for KM and that is what I want to talk about the most. (The others are excellent features, but I haven’t found good uses for them just yet and I didn’t want to reach to find a use for them just to write about.)įor me the biggest addition is variables, which allows you to ask the user for input and output it in specific areas without having to rely on clipboard history. Meaning that making more complex macros just got a whole lot easier.īest just to show an example workflow. When it is all said and done I get a TextMate document that looks like this: The key here is the variables, which as I have them implemented present dialogs like this: I mentioned above that I use KM to post linked posts to this blog, () - now the process is much more automated. ![]() Pretty neat, right? I was able to do this before, but I had to click around and fill out the different ‘fields’ in TextMate, now all I need to to is add my comments and publish. The way I like to think about Keyboard Maestro is that it is a way for me to master my workflow - to command it - so it doesn’t command me. Keyboard Maestro makes your computer work for you, not the other way around. It is one of the five best apps I have ever used on my Mac, hell on any device period. It is that good - be warned though, there is a learning curve with this software, but I believe the payoff is well worth the time spent getting to learn it. KM 5 also comes with a library of macros to get new users started. Showing you everything that I do isn’t likely to be that helpful to you - we all work differently. I show you my workflows and tell you about things that I do in hopes that I will be able to spark an idea of how you could use KM - there is more than one way to do things. When I start to set up a new macro in KM here is how I work through getting the macro set up (I share this to help, if I can, you get going with KM):ġ.
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