Introduction to Keyboard Maestro - The Ultimate Mac Productivity Tool!

if you want to be more productive on your mac then you may be interested in a little piece of software called keyboard maestro and i'm going to introduce it in this video hello welcome to take one tech my name's alec and in this video we're talking about one of my favorite pieces of software keyboard maestro uh i would say that this combined with a couple of other productivity tools uh hazel which i did a video on the other day so i'll leave a link to that in the top corner and also uh textexpander i nearly forgot it then is that important uh textexpander as well these three together form really sort of the backbone of my productivity and automation workflows on the mac so they really are an important part of my uh day-to-day work really now there isn't enough time to give you a full overview of keyboard maestro uh if this video was 24 hours long i'd still be talking at the end of it i use it that much and for that many different things uh there is no end of possibilities with it really as you will soon find out but what is it exactly well it is quite a simple application at its core it basically looks for some form of trigger and then once it sees that trigger it performs some sort of action and the thing that makes it so amazing is all of the different kinds of triggers that you can have and then all of the different sorts of actions that can be performed with it as we'll see when we dig into the application and those give a sort of almost limitless uh number of possibilities of what you could actually do with it and the other thing is that it can work with so many different applications and different ways of integrating into your system that it really is uh yeah an amazing piece of software but i'll let you be the judge of that so where do you get it from and how much does it cost well i'll tell you that first of all because you're not going to believe this it is 38 and i say you're not going to believe it you'll have to try it first to understand the real power of it so it is from keyboardmaestro.com and it is uh as it says on the front the premiere mac automation software and i would definitely agree with that statement so you can get a free trial of it just click the big download button at the top here and then you can also click the buy now button to go and buy the software and as i say it is uh did i say the price right let's find out shall we all the suspense now suddenly look at this my internet's so slow isn't it why has that happened of all times it's been lightning fast up until now there you go 36 did i say 36 i don't know that's how much it is anyway and for the amount of time and uh sort of productivity that i've got out of this app for 36 dollars though it really is just an awesome piece of software and awesome value but let's get into showing you how it works shall we instead of just uh waffling on as i often do so i'm going to show you the interface in fact before i show the interface when you download it and go to install it this is one of those apps that is sort of deeply rooted into your mac's system and so when you go through the install process it will just prompt you to go and give access to it to a number of different levels in your security and privacy settings of your system preferences in the mac it will tell you where to go to activate that and to give it those permissions but just to be aware of not to be worried about that if it's asking for access to your you know full disk disk access and things like that uh it needs that to be able to do the thing that it does so with that out of the way let's have a look at what the actual app interface looks like so we've basically got uh let me just resize this a bit that's a bit unprofessional isn't it look at that extra space there there we go uh so we've basically got quite a simple interface in my view where we've got essentially three different columns so we've got this column here this column and this column this column over here is basically its groups of macros so the little actions that we're going to create the little sort of small programs that we're going to create within keyboard maestro are all called macros and the macros are listed in this column but we can group those because once you get large numbers then it would be a bit tricky to see them all in a big list and so you can create little groups of macros and so this is where you create those groups essentially just like a folder hence they all look like little folders so within each of these folders we've then got the actual macros themselves that are contained in there and then this window on the right hand side the larger window is basically where we define anything to do with the actual the groups or the macros depending on what we've got selected so now we have the keyboard filters group of macros selected and over here you can see that this is a folder a group and it's got the name of it so i could change the name of it there and i can also uh add a few extra little details here such as um is this group of macros enabled so you could have a group of macros that you either toggle on or off together all at once so that's where you would do that and you might have a set of macros that you want to work just for a specific application and so you can do that at the group level by saying here that you want it available in all applications or you could just select some specific applications or you might want it to work in everything except certain applications so this is where we can select that and by the way these settings that are here are the defaults so by default when you create a new group it is enabled it will work in all applications in all windows and so on so yes you can also select that you want it to work only in a specific window so for example you might have some macros that you want to run when you're on a specific website and so you could enable it for only working in safari but also only in windows you know where the title was the name of the the website that you're on for example so that is uh where you would specify that and then you've got this this list of macros and as i say if you just click on one of these macros then this window then changes to be the way to define those macros so what i thought i'd do is i'd create a couple of simple macros just to give you a sort of taste of what it can do and in doing so you will see the sort of process that we use to create the macros and also you'll see all the different sort of triggers that we can use and then also the range of different types of applicator of action we can perform as well so the first thing i'm going to do is create a new group of macros so what we do is we come to the groups column and then click on the little plus button down at the bottom here and so now we've got our untitled macro group but over here you can see the text is highlighted in the title so i'm just going to call this demo group very original and then what i'm going to do is now that we've got our group what i'm going to do is i'm going to create our first macro so i'm going to come down to the macros column and at the bottom of here we've also got a plus button so i'm going to click on the plus and this is called untitled macro now the macro that i'm going to use as a sort of initial demonstration here is i'm going to create a little macro that basically minimizes all of the windows on the screen so that if you want to just totally clear all of the windows and get rid of them all off the off the screen uh we can do that now unbelievably here i'll say unbelievably it is believable there is no single hotkey to do this on the mac unlike windows where there is a single key that you can press or keystroke a keyboard shortcut to actually just minimize all windows they don't have anything like that on the mac what they do have is you can minimize all windows of the current application or you can minimize all windows of everything except the current application so you can achieve this by pressing two separate keyboard shortcuts but not with a single keyboard shortcut and so that is what i'm going to program today by way of an example so what i'm going to call this macro is basically hide all windows like that and then this now is going to show an example of how we actually set this up and what we've got here is we've got the title of the macro and then at the top we've got our triggers so you can see we've got a little plus icon to add new trigger so here we can put in as many different triggers as we want and you can have them stacked as well so you can have just one trigger or you could have two triggers that have to happen at the same time or together or you could have two triggers where one or the other could be uh true and so you can sort of build up really quite complex series of triggers like that next we have the actions and so the actions uh basically the same we can just add in actions down here and once again you can have as many different actions as you want and so you can have it perform multiple different things from one trigger or multiple triggers performing multiple different things so let's have a look shall we at some of these triggers if i click on the little plus icon what you see is that brings up a list of different types of triggers and this already looks like quite a long list but actually within each of these there are various different ways that you can format them and set them up as well so there's actually multiple times more than these triggers available now what we're going to do is hide all windows so the way that i'm going to do this is i'm going to set a hotkey which is anything we want really but i'll use command alt control h to hide all windows um and we're going to use a hotkey trigger for that so anything where you're setting basically a keyboard shortcut you're going to use these hotkeys um but just while we're in here let's have a look at some of the other types of trigger that there are so that you can get an idea of the sort of things you might be able to do with it so we've got a keyboard hot hotkey trigger here is the first one um but then let me just pick out a few of these other ones so for example application trigger so you can have certain things that happen when an application either opens or shuts or is open so that can be as part of a combination you only want the thing to trigger when a particular application is open or when an application opens up like i say so i have one that turns my uh computer onto do not disturb mode when i open zoom because i only open zoom when i'm going to have a meeting and i don't want to be disturbed during the meeting so that is an example of a macro that i have set up where you have the application trigger zoom opens and then the action is turn on do not disturb and then i have a second one i think you know where this is going uh when zoom closes turn off do not disturb so that is an example of how you might use an application trigger another option for the application trigger is say you are using some recording software such as ecom live as i do and you only open that up when you are about to record then you may want it to shut down a load of other apps or in fact shut down every other app when you open up that particular application so that would be a way of of doing that uh so let me have a look at some of these others a keyboard sorry clipboard so that is if you want to have specific clipboard actions so for example when you copy something to the clipboard maybe it's going to uh say when you copy an image to the clipboard you want it to do something with it you can have have that another option that you have in here is a good one is actually down here the bottom wireless network trigger so this one you can have your computer change states or do different things depending on which wireless network you are connected to so for example your favorite coffee shop you could have a trigger so that when you connect to the wi-fi of your coffee shop maybe you don't want to start syncing your computer or doing downloads or anything like that so you can have it turn off those features so that is another one another uh option you've got for a trigger here is a time of day so if you want to run some backup tasks or something like that that you want to do at the end of the day or when you're not working then you can set up triggers in that way so there are as you can see lots of different ones and i've only just touched on a couple of them really uh and indeed when you go into each of these ones you have multiple different options within those uh uh triggers themselves as well so let's go back to the one that we're just focused on at the moment and this is the hotkey trigger and now that i've got this selected uh it's basically just got this highlighted for me to type the keyboard shortcut or just press it so if i just press the keys there we go so i've now set my keyboard shortcut as that control option command h and then you have some other options even at this level as well so basically that is my keyboard shortcut and now do i want this to trigger when this is pressed or do i want to pre uh do it when it's held down or do i want to perform the action when it is released uh or is tapped tapped once tap twice tap three times tap four times so you can have you know little actions if you want to just say double tap on a key and it will start the action you also have that option there as well um you can also have some things where maybe you want it to do one thing when you hold it down and then another thing when you take it off so for example if you wanted to i don't know have a little mute button that was muted while you were holding the key down and then unmute when you hold it off like a sort of they call it a cough button so that if you're on a zoom call you can just quickly press and hold it down and then take your finger off and it will unmute uh that might be quicker than pressing the mute button and unmute uh so lots of different options that you can have here with in terms of how this trigger actually works uh so then the next thing is uh by the way we could actually add a whole series of other um triggers in here as i say just by clicking the plus and just setting a new trigger as well and it would just add it to this list but for now we're just going to stick with something simple and one uh one trigger so now we're going to add the action and if you remember the action is we want to minimize all of the windows or hide all of the windows so we're going to click on the new action and what you'll notice is when i click on new action there'll be a panel slide up from the bottom with all the actions so there we go and now what we've got is we've got two separate columns one is categories as in categories of actions and the others the other column is the actions themself and there is a little uh search bar just at the top excuse me uh where we can actually search for an action and so you can see that these are basically grouped to make it easier to find and if i just give you a taste of some of the actions that you might want to perform like for example images so you can perform actions on images such as well there's a good one that i use ocr image so if you have images and there's text in it and you want to use optical character recognition then you can actually do that from within here you can do that with things like i use hazel to sort my things like bank statements and things like that that are brought down into my downloads folder the uh the video that i did on hazel the other day tells you about how to automate moving things out of your downloads folder and filing them away for from you for you and then you can also use keyboard maestro to perform optical character recognition and pull out little bits of information and things like that on an image and add it into the file names things like that uh you can also uh read a file or write to a file uh so i have different shortcuts for this is in the image section actually but i use this with text for example so i uh a lot of my notes and things like that are just in raw text files so dot txt that's my my sort of notes system is just text files because then they all translate across to everything rather than a specific application like i know people use evernote but i don't like being sort of bound to one ecosystem so i use text files a lot and then i have keyboard maestro uh be able to append notes to different text files and things like that so you can do that with keyboard maestro uh you can also do things like flip an image rotate image all these sorts of things you can also change the dpi the dots per inch the resolution of the image and crop and resize images so one of the actions that i have is basically um from my my web design days is being able to have an image and then i want to resize them to a specific size and then sometimes i also want to have a sort of thumbnail image of that at a lower resolution and also a smaller size so i've got a keyboard maestro macro that basically takes the image resizes it puts it in a particular folder creates another copy of it resizes that changes the resolution and puts that in my little thumbnails folder uh for the for for websites and things like that so you can do all manner of different things and as i say that what that one i've just mentioned is a case of a sort of multi-action uh uh macro that basically does a whole series of actions on something and like i say the list of what you can do is pretty endless so what else can we do with images so you can uh get image sizes get information get file information and things like that from them and this is just all in the image uh group or category of actions there's also things like web so you can open a url so if you want to open your url go and get some information and copy that and paste it somewhere else then you can do all of these sorts of things with here there are really a huge amount of things files you can get a file copy files duplicate files all of these sorts of things uh get file attributes file the you know the the file size all this sort of stuff there's really a huge amount of stuff that you can do so uh what you would need to do is download the free trial and just go and have a look at some of these actions in fact this is the sort of main actions list and i'll just scroll down through it there is an absolute load of things and as i say for each of these actions there are a huge number of different variations that you can actually uh perform on them as well and ways that you can sort of tweak it to your exact requirements and i haven't got into third party plugins for keyboard maestro either there are different scripts and things like that that you can download that have already been created for you but now today what we're going to do is stick with something basic which is basically hide or windows it's quite convenient because there is just a simple keyboard maestro command already uh in here so i've just typed hide in the search bar and as you can see we've got a couple of options hide a specific application or hide all applications is the second one down and that is the one that we want so all i'm going to do to add this into our actions palette over here is just click on this one and then that has gone down to hide all applications what you'll find is with uh these uh actions there will always be this little cog wheel where you can have some different uh options so you can always just try the action or you can disable it so you might want to leave it in a workflow or in a in a macro but then just disable it for the time being you can rename it if you've got multiple instances then sometimes it's good to be able to rename the the the macro so that you know exactly what it is obviously in this case hide all applications it's pretty self-explanatory you can also change the color so you can actually change the color of the the macro sorry of the action within the macro uh this is good if you have start building out really long things and you want to sort of color code them so i do that with some of my my things or if you've got sort of key elements that you need to know which ones you might want to go back and edit then it's a good way to highlight things like that you can also add notes and things like that copy text images and so on so there's a and also by the way there's this option down here which i don't know if i'm just getting it in let me move that over a bit uh there is um some sort of logic that you can perform to these actions so as well as having it do all of them together you can also add some uh some logic so basically like if then statements or while statements so basically creating loops where it does something while another criteria is true and so that's where you would have those and repeating and all this sort of stuff or carrying on until a certain point and so on and then you can also have it go and bring in another macro and various different things like that so there are as i say at every step of the way what you'll find is although the interface is basic there is lots of ways that you can layer on different levels of i suppose complexity really but we have just started with something very basic so i'm going to close this down now and now what you can see is basically we've got our demo group that we created we've got our first macro called hide all windows which is what i named it and we've got our keyboard shortcut which is that and then this is where we've defined our macro now if i press that keyboard shortcut what we'll find is everything disappears and that has now worked and basically moved all of minimized all of my windows so let me bring them back again what i want to also show you is how if you use the stream deck you can actually do all of this from stream deck as well without actually using the keyboard shortcut you can obviously use the keyboard shortcut with keyboard maestro but i'm what i'm going to show you is something a little bit different so now if i just minimize all my windows again try that macro and then i'm just going to open my uh here we go with my stream deck and i've created a little folder i don't normally use folders these days but i've created one just so that i can demonstrate how we can integrate keyboard maestro with uh stream deck so first of all we're going to come up to this little uh icon up here for the plugins on uh keyboard on stream deck i'm going to get all of these terms mixed around and in the plugins section whoopsie daisy i was just in it but i've here we go so in the plug-in section if you go up to the search bar and start typing keyboard maestro what you'll see is there is a plug-in here by stairway software now that is the makers of keyboard maestro and they have made their own plugin for the stream deck and so you can install it by clicking on this blue button here and you may have noticed that i haven't actually got it installed and that is because there is a much better in my mind uh plugin for keyboard maestro uh for the stream deck and that is a third-party one and it's just called km link and i would recommend you give that one a go because it is much easier to just activate your macros this way have a look at keyboard maestro plugin as well by all means i just find it's a little bit more clunky and the way that you program what macros you want to run is just not necessarily the most intuitive whereas this one as you'll see is so easy to use uh let's go and have a little look now and you'll you'll see what i mean uh basically this now fits in your uh stream deck you'll see in this custom column here this custom group of actions um you've got this one km link and that's all it is it's a plugin with one single action and you just drag it across to your stream deck and then what you do is you can give the action a title obviously just as you're familiar with if you use stream deck but then you just select the macro from your list and it pulls up all of your macros that you've got in your keyboard maestro and so here we've got our demo group uh hang on a minute i'm off the bottom of the screen sharing so you can't see it there we go we've got this one here hide all windows so if i click on this one so now i've got this button programmed into my stream deck and then what i'm going to do is move this out of the way and i'll just bring up that other window again like this and then if i press the button on my stream deck now it is going to hide all windows it is simple as that so definitely km link for me is the way to go because as you can see it's so easy to just program now let's have a look at another example shall we just uh one more example before i go and as i say i will be doing a whole series of videos all about this and how you can create much more advanced macros and then also how i use it with stream deck as well because you can do some quite advanced things with it if you if you just sort of program various different things in with this and in combination with stream deck so let's create one now as an example how about one for if you want to say start a particular program and when you're doing that you don't want all of the other programs running so for example ecam live might be an example of that if i want to say i want a button that is going to basically open my ecam live but then shut all of my other applications then uh what i would do is i would come back down to my my macros here and i'm going to click on the plus icon and now i'm going to call this one um start ecamm and by the way in case you were not aware i think most of my viewers probably are by now if you weren't aware ecamm live is the live production software that i use to make these videos so there is a very real real reason why you may want to have ecam live open and everything else shut so that it doesn't interfere with your production and you don't get all sorts of other things going on so that is why you might want to do that so i'm going to call this one start ecamp and i'm going to add a trigger i'll just do a simple one again with a keyboard trigger and we'll do like this command option control e and when that's pressed what it's going to do is we want a new action and we want it to open ecom live so this is actually you can search for open but actually the way it's referred to in here is activate so you both will work but activate is specifically for activating an application so i can come over to here and then you can see activate specific application so i'm going to click on that one and then it's asking for the application to activate so that's saying finder but we don't want fida we want eco live so although i'm using the beta click on ecom live like that uh so that is what we've done there and the next thing we want to do is basically quit all other apps so now i've just realized i'm doing this the wrong way around already because it's what it's going to do is it's going to open ecom live and then quit everything including that so let's quit the other apps first shall we so if i type in quit started typing quit we've got here quit a specific application or quit all applications so i'm going to click on uh quit all applications like that and what i'm going to do is i'm also just going to drag this up above that one so that it quits the applications first and then it adds it opens the ecom live afterwards so now i'm not going to do this now but now this would if i press the shortcut and i didn't have my econ live open basically it would close everything and open ecam live now i've just realized another thing that i would probably want to do in my specific case is i would also i would also want to make sure i had got my audio hijack open so i'm also going to activate audio hijack because that is what i use for my thing oopsy daisy i've done the wrong one there by the way that's a good example i almost looked like i intended that didn't i if you ever you want to get rid of one you can see that i'm just one of the active one is highlighted with a little blue border so i'll just click on delete and it just deletes it out so i want to activate a specific application again and then this one i would just set as audio hijack so there we go that is basically for me to set up my ecam live by closing everything else and starting ecom live you can also exclude applications if you don't want to close everything down but that is just a little example of how you would go about creating some macros and as you can see we've got a couple of macros in here so what i'm doing at the moment is i'm just sort of transferring my macros across from my other computer and building them out and clearing some of them out because some of them are related to jobs and tasks that i was doing uh eight or ten years ago that i just don't do anymore so i'm sort of having a bit of a spring clean of all of my macros but as i go through then what i'm going to do is as i say just build out this whole series of keyboard maestro videos now it can be a little bit daunting uh to see all of the things that you can do with it but the way to approach keyboard maestro and hazel for that matter and also the other one that i mentioned text expander in my view is not to try and plan out all of the things that you may want to do and create macros for them but rather just know the capabilities of them and have them there on your mac and then as you go through your daily workflow and you notice that there is something that you are doing repeatedly uh or you know every day or several times a day or every week or whatever it is then just notice those things and notice and understand and that those things can often be done by things like keyboard maestro and hazel and so slowly but surely integrate those into your workflow and what you'll find is in a decade's time or however long you'll realize you've got thousands of these things that have just become total second nature to you and are just all working in the background and you are becoming far more productive but you don't have to wait 10 years by the way that sounds a bit of a long way away uh you could see a difference in a matter of you know days and weeks but uh basically what i'm saying is you don't have to sort of think that you've got to do everything all at once just build it up bit by bit and it will certainly pay dividends to you well i hope you've found that interesting and if you've got any specific questions by the way about keyboard maestro then feel free to leave them in the comments and if you want to see any specific macros or you've got any use cases that you would like to explore further then that leave those in the comments as well and i'll be happy to uh do any demos that anybody wants related to keyboard maestro as i say it's a big topic and i'm going to make a few more videos about it because it really is one of those things that pays dividends for people who actually integrate it into their workflow so uh as i say leave any questions or comments you've got down below and while you're down there don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel and why not share it with somebody else who needs a bit more productivity in their mac lives as well so that's all for this video but don't go anywhere because there's more great videos coming up next over on the right hand side have a great day everyone [Music] you

Channel: Take One Tech

Views: 725

Keywords: Keyboard Maestro, keyboard maestro mac tutorial, keyboard maestro tutorial, keyboard maestro pro tools, keyboard maestro macros, keyboard maestro mouse click, keyboard maestro review, keyboard maestro mouse click trigger, mac productivity hacks, mac productivity tips, ali mac productivity, macos productivity, mac automation tips, mac automation software, mac automation tools, mac automation app, macos automation, must have mac apps, mac keyboard shortcuts, mac efficiency

Id: Gr5FwmACd1M

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021