Keyboard Maestro 8.0
stairways.comThis app is seriously amazing.
I recently wrote about how I use it together with Typinator to completely automate writing text :
https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/write-once-never-write-ag...
There is also a video in the end where it shows all of its powers in action.
And I share all the interesting Keyboard Maestro macros I use in a list here :
A shortcut for "this"? Don't you spend too much time triggering shortcuts and looking up the letter from the palettes than actually touch typing some of the words?
Keyboard Maestro and BetterTouchTool have been my favorite Mac utilities for many years.
One tiny example: I use hidutil + Keyboard Maestro to map my Caps Lock key to CMD+Tab. I found that constantly hitting CMD+Tab throughout the day caused me some wrist strain.
So instead, I now map my Caps Lock to Keypad 0 using hidutil. And then I use Keyboard Maestro to invoke CMD+Tab everytime Keypad 0 occurs. So now, CMD+Tab is just a single keystroke. It's a small win, but it's something that I do many many times per day.
A second example: I use 1Password, but sometimes some apps or sites DO NOT allow me to paste my password. Ugh. So I use a Keyboard Maestro macro to type out my copied password. Now that I think of it, I hope they're not stealing all my passwords! ;-)
> A second example: I use 1Password, but sometimes some apps or sites DO NOT allow me to paste my password. Ugh. So I use a Keyboard Maestro macro to type out my copied password. Now that I think of it, I hope they're not stealing all my passwords! ;-)
This is something I haven't thought of! Thanks a lot for the tip!
Here's my macro:
https://i.imgur.com/zkaxakJ.png
It just types out whatever is in my clipboard. I use it for copying and inserting credit card numbers and passwords, since some sites don't allow you to paste into those text fields.
Quite surprised to see Perth, Western Australia. I was wondering if there were any developers left in my home town, the (now second) most isolated city in the world.
Kudos to the team on the release.
http://blog.id.com.au/2012/population/population-trends/is-p...
I too am from Perth and am also often amused to hear of any form of software development industry in our home town .. but it has to be said that Perth can produce some very interesting technology outliers at times. Just look at whats happening with 3D-printing in Perth, for example (AuroraLabs) .. some truly innovative folks still living there.
IBM have a development team there in Hay St, I used to work with them, a few years back. There's software development going on at the RAC too, a variety of mining related software companies and ... I thin kthere was something about video surveillance cams for public transport. Oh and a couple of ISPs, probably not developing much.
That's about all I remember encountering from my time living in Perth.
What's the most isolated city then?
Was always curious to go to Perth. Maybe once we get the direct Perth-London flights next year. Though 18 hours on the plane isn't much fun..
Apparently Honolulu being 3,673km from its nearest city.
Perth is only 2,139km from its closest city Adelaide.
Source: http://www.westcoastassist.com.au/Perth_the_second_most_isol...
How and why do they pick Adelaide? There are some (small) cities around Perth.
I guess it should have been "nearest (capital) city"
Depends on your definition of "city". Is Geraldton or Bunbury a city? Not by European standards, though maybe by the US definition.
To a Brit, those are towns, probably even small towns.
In the US, we are loose about the term "city." The "city" I live in has a population of I 76,000. The neighboring town, Fort Collins, has a population of 164,000. But in 1990, my town, Loveland, only had 40,000 residents and I still would have called it a city.
The term "big city" is more specific. That's a major city, probably with skyscrapers. Population is probably close to a million or more.
The term "metropolis" is even more specific. That's a really big city, one of the top 20 in the US, to give a rough sense. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles are metropolises. Denver? It's a big city, but I don't know about metropolis.
Geraldton, to the north of Perth, is about 40k, the biggest settlement in WA outside of Perth seems to be about 60k...
The next town along from where I grew up in the UK is about 80k and is in no way a city...
> So I checked it. Turns out, it’s false.
Lots of people are saying how they love this app. I'd be interested in reading examples of how people are using it.
I wish the author provided the source code, even if they continued charging money. Based on the functionality I'm guessing it'll require enabling accessibility, which means it can essentially hijack your computer. I've been slowly whittling down my usage of closed-source third-party apps in order to reduce my effective "circle of trust" and reduce the chances of being subject to attacks. Why are commercial open source apps so uncommon? Textual is an example of one such app, but I can't think of many others.
In practice, if something was truly open-source, there'd be nothing to prevent someone who didn't like you from building your app with each new release and putting on a web site for anyone to download for free. You might be the kind of guy who would pay $40 for good software, but a lot of people would get the free version and not pay. This is the eternal conundrum of open source.
Here's a modified idea, perhaps still not good enough but hopefully a step down the path. When you purchase the product, you receive access to the source code for the version that was then-current one year ago. Granted, you are not sure the current code doesn't have malware. But you can be confident, based on the history of the product, that it did not have malware for a long time. (And were you really going to scan the diffs for each release for malware anyway?) You could also allow trusted third-parties under NDA to review all diffs for the current code base and certify that they didn't see anything malicious.
This also ensures that should your company disappear, at the very worst, the user community will have a not-too-old version of the software to fall back on.
This app is so good, I use it to automate project workflows in iterm2. Something like, open terminal -> create tabs -> switch folders -> run services, etc. Also, remaping keystrokes to create macros and using hjkl as arrows.
Just downloaded it, gave it a try, and already in love with it! Will definitely buy it later today.
What I did with it: Automated searching a project name in an app called Todoist where I have to hit slash to go to the search field, enter a `#` sign as a prefix for project names, hit the down arrow key to select the project name that is suggested and finally hit enter key. This'll go right to that project. Now I hit a hotkey, enter a partial name for the project and enter. It'll open Todoist or put focus on it and open the appropriate project.
It was super easy to create the macro.
Keyboard Maestro is one of the most underrated apps for power users. I had it for a long time and finally began to realize what amazing power you get with this tool. Others also mentioned BetterTouchTool. With that and Keyboard Maestro, if you have that little thing you wish an app would allow you to do, most of the time you can do it by using these two tools.
As Ferris Beuller said, if you have the means (and almost all of you do), I highly recommend it.
Interesting app is there an alternative for linux?
AutoHotKey was already mentioned, which I use on windows. I have been looking for an alternative that I can also use on Linux and Mac OS and found SikuliX (http://www.sikulix.com/). Note that I have no idea if either AutoHotKey or SikuliX are actually capable of replicating the functionality of Keyboard Maestro since I've never used Keyboard Maestro.
Also recently I found a cross platform automation system written in go that looks promising: robotgo (https://github.com/go-vgo/robotgo). I might try to use robotgo to replace the AutoHotKey scripts in my own little Unity3D command line tool unity_do (https://github.com/rakete/unity_do) in the future. So I don't have any experience with it yet.
Autokey (which is a poor copy of AutoHotKey on windows). Or simpler: you can make your own python script using the `keyboard` module (that's basically what Autokey is). Really simple to use and powerful
xbindkeys probably?
I really want to get into these types of apps as I think it will greatly improve my work speed. But I am always afraid of becoming over-dependent on these tools. I commonly change environments in my work, so I often have to adapt to new systems.
If these tools are somehow portable via usb/internet sync, I think I would start to use them more.
Keyboard Maestro has a sync option, but of course you'd still be reliant on a mac.
I have this, and I do believe what people say about how powerful it is. However, I find the UI to be very alien and very unlike any other software I have used (especially on Mac).
How so? It's essentially trying (and, IMO, succeeding) to make coding drag and droppable. While some things can be a bit difficult to get going, overall it works extremely well I think.
First and foremost, the state indicators are very confusing.
For example, when you create a new macro, the macro editor shows a button to the right of the name that is either a check or an X. If you click the check (which would mean what, anyway?), it switches to an X. Did you just complete some action by "checking" it? Apparently, clicking the Check button _disables_ the macro. Clicking the X enables the macro. To me that seems backwards, but either way it's a very poor state indicator+driver.
Then you have inconsistent behaviors of the + buttons. In the Groups and Macros columns, their + buttons add a new element. But in the macro editor, the + button causes an action panel to slide up over the Groups and Macros sections. So + doesn't add a macro step, it just shows you the things you can select from (and drag) to build the macro.
Now, the - (minus) button on the macro panel... it doesn't remove the panel that the + just popped up; it deletes the current macro action. To remove the panel, you have to click the grayed out + button.
And when you're done adding a macro action, should you click the check button on the bottom? Apparently not; that toggles the last action on or off.
Ok, so you've got an action. Want to add another action? If the panel with all the available actions is open, can you drag one down below your last action (repeating the same behavior you followed to add the first action? Nope. You have to click that grayed out + button to remove the actions panel. Then a new button appears below the last aciton - "+ New Action". Click that, and the action selection panel slides up again. Drag another action down to the macro panel and ... oops! That doesn't work!? But that's how we got the first action there, and we just clicked "+ New Action" (and it showed us the action choices). Ahh, this time you must double click the action you want - not drag it. Now it appears in the macro actions window.
The UI is a wreck. The app is great, but the UI seems like another entry here: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/6/9/15768800/reddit-worst...
I'll have to agree with you here. The UI needs some serious work. You will get used to it's quirks after a while though.
Even with that major flaw, it's probably the best "bang for the buck" software I've ever owned. Period.
Edit: And.. as mentioned elsewhere - the support truly is fantastic. You can tell the developer is really passionate about this project.
I bought this app but was never able to unlock its potential.
All the tutorials that I read seem to be too complicated.
Anyone can point to easy to understand tutorials for creating workflows?
I seem to remember that Macstories has a few good tutorials: https://www.macstories.net/tag/keyboard-maestro/
I absolutely love this app too.
And for the record their support is amazing, very knowledgeable and responsive.
I use it quite often to type in unicode characters like ⌘, or music sharp/flats, etc.