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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
hotkeys for very elaborated commands for my daytrading
avid vim user so adding sequence hotkeys for basically all apps and websites.
automating files archiving, notetaking, logging time etcc etc.
I mean better questions would be what it is not for?
It just makes so much sense and makes it easier to have one app with all your settings that you have control over than 100s of apps where you have to learn arbitrary commands.
