Sit back and watch your Mac work with Keyboard Maestro

I love being able to customise my Mac, to make it behave exactly how I want it to. I’ll happily spend an hour or two finding ways to shave a second off the time it takes to do a routine action a dozen times a day.

Show me the time.

The pay back may be slow, but it’s sure. It may only add up to an hour per month or even per year, but it’s the ‘smoother’ experience that really counts.

Keyboard Maestro has recently regained a firm place on my Mac. I used to use it years ago, then for some reason it didn’t survive a transition to a new Mac. With this latest new MacBook Pro it’s back:

With Keyboard Maestro you can design your own shortcuts and activate them at any time …

Keyboard Maestro has support for selecting menus, opening files or applications, controlling iTunes and QuickTime Player, pasting text, running scripts, and controlling processes, and these actions can be chained together and executed in response to a variety of triggers.

Open clipboard links

Open URL in Firefox.

Sometimes I want to open a copied link in a specific browser. This is especially the case when I set Chrome to be the default browser, as I sometimes do.

Chrome has poor support for 1Password, the utility that lets me enter usernames and passwords for any website with a single keystroke. It’s easier to copy the URL and open it in a web browser that does support 1Password.

My Keyboard Maestro macro activates the browser I choose, pastes in the URL and calls up the page.

Show or tell me the time

I make screencast videos each week for MacTips. Before I start I clean up the menu bar removing the various icons I like to have up there. I also remove the date and time.

Show me the time.

Removing the date and time and putting them back is a big nuisance, so I’ve decided to just not show them. That leaves me with the problem of knowing what the time is, or checking the date.

Now I use a couple of Keyboard Maestro macros that either show or speak the date or time. Those that speak use an Applescript, while those that show bring up a simple alert.

Filter the clipboard

A very interesting item I haven’t actually used much yet is to Filter the Clipboard.

Keyboard Maestro can do various things with white space, upper and lower case, HTML entities, and styles. But it can also count characters, words or lines on the clipboard. Copy a stretch of text then trigger the Count Words macro. The number of words is put on the clipboard (replacing the text).

And at 508 words this blog post is long enough. Try out Keyboard Maestro for yourself.

Tagged as: actions, Applescript, Mac, macros, text, URLs

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