Great post. I would have to add to it, that once you get the rest of the basics under your hat, be sure to learn regular expressions. Months ago I finally took a week to learn and experiment with them, and they have totally changed my whole automation game. They allow you to extract pieces of text based on set of rules, or run advanced find and replace commands. Many actions in KM let you take advantage of this powerful tool.
In the beginning, I was pretty confused about using them and would spend hours trying to modify a regular expression to work that I found on the Internet. But actually sitting down and learning them from scratch usually lets me condense what would have been 5 or even way more separate actions into one, and often more reliably.
http://regexr.com Was the tool that got me figuring this stuff out with their cheat sheets and example expressions. It is my go to tool for writing a regular expression so can see how it will behave before using it in KM.
yessir, I have set up a bunch of (all three + letter) macros for everything related to KM now, like T for Trigger macro by name, and also, I set up (all three) plus space bar to display a large quick map of the modifier symbols and what keys they actually are, since I'm really new to using those keys and can never keep them totally straight just by their symbols (except command).
so control option command space puts this over my screen for a few seconds:
Is this a UI you built or one of the included options? I use KeyCue and I also have Picture in Picture selected in Accessibility and I note it's coming up when I press CONTROL+OPTION+COMMAND. (new discovery!) so I may have to modify to use this choice. Explain a little deeper if you don't mind.
I suggest you to look into Karainber and sticky keys as I myself had trouble twisting and remembering all these hotkeys.
Being able to rebind everything yourself and have the modifier keys be right there on your keyboard letters is a really huge productivity boost. Plus there is a ton of freedom making the hotkeys work for you rather than against you.
Great post and I’m in that first couple weeks of using KM but still quite unsure why or how to use it. I have some time this week so will try to figure some things out with your post, and I guess what I’ve learned is to ask questions of the forum or describe what I’m trying to do. Thank you for the post.
Welcome to Keyboard Maestro! It is the best Mac automation tool I have ever used.
However, you may be misled by its name.
KM suffers from a name ("Keyboard") that immediately causes the potential user/customer to think it is very limited, when in fact it is quite broad:
Text Expansion -- Provides extensive text expansion capability, from simple text substitution to complex snippet generation using scripts and user interaction
App Launcher -- from simple to complex (think of using @DanThomas' search macros)
Workflow Designer -- from a few simple steps to very complex, multi-macro, multi-scripts
Built-in integration with all Mac scripting languages
Web Page Control and Data Extraction -- From simple page display to auto-fill of online forms to scraping of data both visible to the user and hidden in the HTML code.
Built-in integration with access to and control of Safari and Google Chrome
Custom Web Applet (i.e. HTML Prompt)
If you, or anyone, has any questions about how to use KM for the above objectives, please feel free to ask.
I use this macro to type kff which expands into kind:folder.
This lets me type kff dog in spotlight and get kind:folder dog, and jump straight to the folder with pictures of my dog, instead of every file with "dog" in the title or contents.
There are better and more complex examples for each, but these are some very minor ones that make my life much easier/better. That Paypal one would've paid for Keyboard Maestro several times over if I had thought of it before needing it
Great ideas. I use KM a ton to do a zillion things, and one that’s helped a lot is being able to automate mouse movements and/or get around using the mouse so much, to save my poor carpel tunnel wrist. I post to social media a lot, and grabbing gifs from websites was literally killing me. Now I can do it with macros through various means.
Thanks for the welcome, and I am pleased to say that I’ve actually made my first macros for tiresome processes that I need to do often in Excel. As noted in a few other posts, I had to learn some things about how to control Excel that I can use without macros too, so it was a double win. For a newbie like me, it’s “getting over the hump” to do something that I want, since many of the examples don’t really apply to me. I’m not a programmer, so it’s all new to me, but it’s cool and I am beginning to think about scripting all sorts of things, as needed. So…I’m in.
I was in the same boat, in fact I made an OmniFocus weekday action that still tells me to use this action. I was out of automating for about a year and this was a good reminder for me when I came back. I love this key command.
at the top right of the Action, and select "Help"
