Keyboard Maestro v8

I’ve heard quite a lot about Keyboard Maestro and didn’t realize how powerful it is until recently. My trial period has not ended yet, but I’ve already decided to make a purchase.

My experience with Keyboard Maestro so far is only scratching the surface, but I’ve already been able to create something useful for me:

  • An “ICYMI Can Opener” that simply opens Safari with a list of URLs that I frequent each day. This saves me a minute or so each time I am bored and ready to check what’s going on in the world.
  • A similar “Financial Can Opener” that opens all URLs of my banking sites.
  • A “Word Count” macro that, eh, counts words. This is especially useful since I’ve decided to write no emails more than 99 words this year, simply to increase my email efficiency.
  • A small utility that takes a piece of markdown text, converts it to RTF, and copies the result to Clipboard. Then this could be pasted in other applications that accept RTF content in Clipboard. This macro is a subroutine used by the next one.
  • A “Bill Calculator” that, prompts me with some input and then does some heavy-lifting to work out a templated email message telling each recipient how much they need to pay our bill of the month, loads it into a new email in Mail with recipients filled in, ready for me to review and send. This saves about 20 minutes of mine each month.

I’ve also taken a look at the Clipboard features that Keyboard Maestro provides, and will use it to replace ClipMenu that I’ve been using for quite a while. (ClipMenu is a bit buggy and stopped development; but it has been indispensable.)

Keyboard Maestro can also in theory totally replace aText and ShiftIt, but right now I don’t have a plan to switch yet.

None of the above are a big deal, but small improvements here and there are the key to big savings. The features in Keyboard Maestro that I am using are only a very small fraction of what it provides. In essence, the scripting language provided in Keyboard Maestro is already Turing complete–and that is huge–not to mention that it provides interface to other scripting languages such as AppleScript, JavaScript, Python, etc.