It’s hard to see this when you’re used to a certain set of actions and “habits”. The hardest thing to do when configuring Keyboard Maestro is trying to take a look at yourself and how you work with a Mac from the outside, and ask your hypothetical external projection “how can this guy improve his workflow?”. And I don’t mean that in a psychologically awkward way. I have yet to unlock the full potential of KM because I still don’t completely understand my own use of a computer. I haven’t “mastered” Keyboard Maestro yet, but not because the app is “difficult” or counter-effective in its intent to make users feel more productive. But as long as laziness leads to saved time, better use of available resources and an overall improved user experience with less clicks and taps, then excuse me while I welcome laziness in my workflow. Is Keyboard Maestro for lazy people? Maybe. Last, you’d give Keyboard Maestro a shortcut, so you only have to think about that, and let the app do the rest while you sit and watch. For my Twitter example, you’d build a macro that sets Twitter as the frontmost app, executes the Refresh action in the File menu, then opens a New Tweet, from the same File menu. Thanks to that menu, in fact, Keyboard Maestro will be able to execute every app’s functionality, as long as it’s been given a name or a keyboard shortcut you can see from the menubar. And by “understanding” in these early stages of Keyboard Maestro learning, I mean taking a look at an app’s menubar menu, and see what options it’s got. Take the example above: Keyboard Maestro doesn’t come with pre-installed Twitter actions, but you can build them by understanding how the Twitter app works. Once you have an idea, building it in Keyboard Maestro is like completing a puzzle. You have to build your own macros from scratch, using a series of simple tools to interact with what’s already installed on your machine. But, and here’s what I didn’t understand at first, it’s not that Keyboard Maestro finds the app on your Mac, and gives you a set of actions like the ones I wrote above. For instance, “Bring Twitter in the background, refresh, and open a new compose window” and “paste as plain text using CMD+V” can both be Keyboard Maestro macros you can configure and use. Macros are a set of pre-determined “workflows” that you can assign to a specific Mac app, multiple ones, or the system itself. The trigger can be a keyboard shortcut, something you typed, a system event – you choose the trigger and there’s plenty of options to look at when deciding which action should initiate a process. Rather, I’d prefer to provide a more empirical look at this app in that I’ll share some of the tricks and functionalities I’ve come to learn and use in the past weeks.Ī simple way to understand Keyboard Maestro is this: you tell the app to do something for you automatically, in the background, whenever you want, and all you have to do to start such sequence is a trigger. The subject is so broad, the offer so variegate and ever-changing, it makes almost no sense to go into every single feature and over-analyze it with no context. Writing a review of Keyboard Maestro it’s like asking someone to “write a review of Apple”. It’s no toy, but it’s fun to use once you get the (easy) hang of it. The app’s real power lies in how it puts the focus on discovering and building what’s better for you, and sticking with it. Keyboard Maestro isn’t strictly about tweaking. Keyboard Maestro empowers you to take existing apps, menus, keyboard shortcuts – anything your Mac can perform – and mix them together to achieve something that fits better your workflow. When you don’t know how to do something, or how to make an existing menu or functionality faster and easier to use, you can turn to Keyboard Maestro and start building your own way out of options third-party developers or Apple didn’t think about. There’s no easy way to describe Keyboard Maestro, but I’ll try: Keyboard Maestro is a trusted and powerful assistant for your Mac. Recent Keyboard Maestro coverage on Brooks Review, and MacDrifter took my curiosity to a whole new level, so thanks to the Productive Macs bundle, I pulled the trigger and got a copy of Keyboard Maestro, which was later upgraded to version 5.0 for free with the same license. I’ve been intrigued by Keyboard Maestro since I first heard about it on Daring Fireball years ago, but never installed and tried the app because of a somewhat widely shared notion that it’s “too difficult to use”.
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