Cool!
Another thing I do, to save my sanity when the stock market is down: a master stock opener. It opens the stockcharts.com website (but the old version, not the new one, which obfuscates links for some reason), then read the source code to find the stocks I need to open daily. It goes through, pulls out a chunk of source code via Applescript, and opens what I need twice a day. Another version of the script will open a more extensive list of things I need to check, flagged stocks or ratios I need to watch semi-regularly.
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Another one, is that I have Keyboard Maestro palettes with macros that help automate some of my work making PDFs, InDesign documents, and Microsoft Office files Section 508 compliant and accessible to people with disabilities. #a11y
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Nice, using "found image"? I frigging love that feature.
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I use Keyboard Maestro extensively at my work.
All my macOS colleagues have a license and I create macros to help their work.
Below is a small sample of my many macros.
Easy open a network folder
One we all share helps us open a folder from our network drive.
We are an ad agency and have a pretty rigid structure for saving files on the network drive.
My server creates a text file every 5 min. of the structure 3 levels down for folders.
The KM macro then uses this list as input for a prompt with list.
This results in a macro, where the end user can input a job number, customer number or anything else from the folder names and press enter to open that folder.
Structure of network drive:
.
├── A
│ ├── A-kassen HKK SID_86822777
│ │ ├── 00 Logoer_86822777
│ │ └── 00 Papirlinje_86822777
│ ├── A. Winther_86847288
│ │ ├── 00 Koder_86847288
│ │ ├── 00 Logoer_86847288
│ │ ├── 00 Papirlinje_86847288
│ │ └── 00 Salg, support og projektledelse_86847288
│ ├── AAB Silkeborg_1014
│ │ ├── 00 Designmanual_1014
│ │ ├── 00 Logoer_1014
│ │ ├── 00 Papirlinje_1014
│ │ ├── 00 billeder_1014
│ │ └── 1231650 C4P kuverter med rude
Scan QR- or barcodes
Some of my macros are my own GUI for command line tools.
For ex. zbar, which can scan an image for QR- and bar-codes.
In my design work I sometimes needs to check what a QR-code contains. Instead of taking my phone and scan it, I use this macro.
It takes a screenshot of part of the screen. Runs it through zbar and returns the output to the clipboard.
Keep Microsoft Teams running
At my work we use Microsoft Teams to communicate, and it is a bit unstable. So the app sometimes quit all of a sudden. So to ensure it keeps running, I have a macro which triggers when Teams quit. Waits 10 seconds and then prompts me if I want to start Teams again. The pause is to allow for the autoupdate mechanism of Teams to complete.
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I am trying to learn Japanese. I use KBM to scrape text from my Wanikani account and write those strings into Notion so I quickly recall them later.
One trigger will scrape the page using JS, store them as variables, then ping Notion's API to add a row to the notion table. Hours saved.
The other thing I can't live without is Palettes and HyperKey it's a total game changer and no more having to remember hot keys, because ultimately you will run out.
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You might find some good ideas in this thread on the Automators forum, even though it's a bit old: Why should I bother with Keyboard Maestro?
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Further to this type of use:
There’s a memorable bit in The Mote in God’s Eye (classic SF novel by Niven & Purnelle) where a Motie engineer mods a crewman’s pistol. S(he) closely inspects the pistol and the crewman’s hand and then deftly applies paste from a tube to the pistol’s grips. The goop hardens immediately, and when the man grasps the pistol again, he finds that it fits his hand perfectly and swears that he could shoot straighter with it.
I’ve long thought that Keyboard Maestro is basically handle grip paste modding for macOS.
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I’m with you on this. That’s actually something I think of asking on this forum, with next to no example to back me up. I look for KM video tutorials and always reminded I’m wanting KM to do something very specific to me. So I end up writing the macro and using it, never refining it nor sharing it with others who could help in refining it, and thus never recording the video that would have helped me create it to begin with. The short of it is I’d love more advanced and specific KM YouTube tutorials and am happy to make them myself, but haven’t.
What are your initial ideas to start one off?
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Basically I am too stupid for KM. I use BetterTouchTool (BTT). But I still use KM very often.
1. KM is my life insurance. There are maybe 40 shortcuts that I can't use my Mac without. For example, starting an app (global). Then there are the app-specific. These shortcuts are set up in KM and BTT. When both apps are running, everything is executed by BTT (conflict-free). KM doesn't do anything because BTT gets the shortcuts beforehand. But for testing purposes I often have to quit BTT. Now the same shortcuts work with KM. That's great for me!
2. KM is (much) more stable: It happens again and again that certain things just don't work with BTT. Why is clear, but that shouldn't play a role here. Before I get annoyed about it, I'd rather do it with KM. That way I can wait as long as it takes until the bug in BTT has been fixed.
3. KM has a few pearls: Basically, BTT can do much more. Sorry, but that's the way it is. But KM has a few actions that BTT lacks and that are very important to me. For example: “Apply Style to System Clipboard”.
I think KM and BTT are the perfect duo. Together they can do everything. 
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You likely underestimate what people (especially here on the forum) do with KM. 
On the contrary, I know that I know nothing about KM. My statement about the pearls refers to "features" that I need but are not available in BTT. What about you, do you know what you don't know about BTT?
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I am an amateur radio operator and my primary radio is a Software Defined Radio. It does not have any physical knobs and buttons. Instead it is completely controlled via a Macintosh application. I much prefer physical knobs and buttons.
I use KM to interface with a repurposed midi DJ controller to change my radio's settings.
Here are some examples of it in use. The grey box in the lower center of the photos is displayed to show the new setting whenever I modify one of the radios's settings using the midi controller.
Tuning
Selecting an antenna for receiving
Changing the bandwith of the received signal
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- Save new client’s translation files to a folder with client’s name plus today’s date in my Dropbox.
- Create a project template for the new client while creating the necessary glossaries.
- All client names easily available thanks to Prompt with list actions.
- Copy the client’s translation package to a newly created folder inside my projects tree.
- Open my translation software in which I’ve automated about everything.
- And I’ve even managed to add new functionality to the trans app, especially to easily add terminology to the glossaries:
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I'm a bit late to the party, but I only found out about this thread in the weekly summary email.
I'm using KM mostly for work, often calling APIs via short curl commands, for example:
- tracking time to Jira
- creating issues in Jira with shorter custom dialogs
- setting my status in Slack, stopping the time tracking and turning off the lights when I take a break
- automatically snoozing Slack, setting an according status and turn lights facing towards me to bright white whenever I join a Zoom call
- start/stop sharing my screen with F13/F15
- inserting current prices for stocks via typed text trigger
- launching the different tools of xScope from buttons on my Stream Deck
- send URL of the currently active tab to people in slack (keyboard shortcut + prompt with list)
Side note: Getting an ambidextrous gaming mouse with a lot of buttons and setting one of them as the 'Hyperkey' was a game changer, because most keyboard shortcuts seem to be for right handed people, but I'm a left handed designer and using the mouse a lot. Being able to trigger shortcuts with one hand is so much faster than having to move the hand from mouse to keyboard and back afterwards.
The most recent personal use of KM is when I'm playing the game No Man's Sky on my Mac. You can trade goods on different planets in this game and I can now press buttons on my Stream Deck to OCR what's currently shown on screen and save names and prices to an Airtable database for later reference.
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It's kinda niche but my favourite macro exports a couple Banktivity reports to CSV, then reformats them in Excel and pastes the values into a portfolio balancing workbook. From there the macro refreshes a pivot table that totals by risk group (e.g. US equity, international equity, bonds, etc.), and highlights whether it's time to rebalance. As a bonus it shows how much the portfolio and each risk group has gone up or down since the last run. The macro makes use of AppleScript for Excel.
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I second this! I have mouse buttons tied to activate specific macros and it does wonders for my productivity as well.
E.g. Take the selected text and search for it on multiple sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).
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KM helps me manage my speaking engagements.
One macro prompts me to fill out a task paper template that creates a project in OmniFocus. While creating the project, it also creates a dictionary entry with key info about the project, like location, client, event name, tag, start/end date, and folder path.
Another macro is a "presentation dashboard" that allows me to search, edit, and delete those dictionary keys.
For example, when entering notes or recording financials for the project, I can easily search on the event name or location to retrieve the tag. Or when I want to file a receipt, I can grab the folder path.
The biggest benefits are convenience and maintaining standard naming conventions. The task paper template asks for a few basics and then formats all the details for me.
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I use Keyboard Maestro for hundreds of tasks on my macs. Its automation is ingrained into my muscle memory; when I work on a mac without Keyboard Maestro, it is quite jarring.
With that said, I was originally motivated to purchase Keyboard Maestro to reduce mouse usage. (For my day job when I was forced to use Windows, I also used AutoHotkey extensively.)
This mouse-free automation, and a few other countermeasures, have freed me from significant ergonomic pain that I had developed due to mouse overuse. I’m so grateful for this relief!
For fun, and for the mental challenge, I also like to develop and share macros that help use Keyboard Maestro more effectively. When sharing, the community interactions on this forum certainly contribute to that enjoyment.
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I sell on eBay for work and have made many tools to simplify my common tasks.
One thing I do all the time is look through my past sales, but getting there takes many clicks (My eBay > Orders > All Orders).
Then the page is slow to load, and once it does, it defaults to searching by Item ID, and sometimes I need to search by SKU, or username, etc. I made myself a tool to quickly do the exact search I want, without the many clicks and loading time.
Creates the URL for me and opens in a new tab.
https://www.ebay.com/sh/ord/?filter=status%%3A%Variable%Local__searchLocation%&search=%Variable%Local__searchType%%%3A%Variable%Local__searchTerm%
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