Keyboard Maestro Field Guide Announcement

hello I'm David sparks and thank you for checking out the free sample of the keyboard maestro field guide keyboard maestro is an application that I have wanted to cover for years because it's just so powerful and once you can get your arms wrapped around it you can automate all sorts of things with your Mac well that was the goal with this field guide I'd like to think I accomplished it I'm real happy with the way it came out I've got some sample material attached to this video so check it out and see what you think and if you like it head over to learn Mac Sparky calm and get yourself a copy thank you let's take a minute to talk about some key board and maestro concepts when I told people I was about to make a keyboard maestro field yet everybody was really happy because everybody's confused by this app but it's not as difficult as you may think keyboard maestro runs on a simple principle for every keyboard maestro script there is a trigger and there is an action for instance if you throw a switch it turns the lights on well think about doing that on your Mac with just about anything on your Mac that can be controlled for example if I hold down the keyboard shortcut command control right arrow then it moves the current window to the right side of the screen in fact that's one of the scripts I'm going to share with you in this field guide here it is right here in keyboard master language first thing you've got is your trigger and that's holding down control command right arrow and then the next thing you have is your action move the current screen to the right side and this may look a little confusing now but trust me by the time we get to the end of the screen casts this is going to be really easy for you the thing about keyboard master that intimidates people though is the sheer number of triggers and actions there are so many ways you can trigger a keyboard maestro script and there are so many actions you can take once you put it it's like if you gave someone a box of Lego with instructions it would be very easy to build that Lego but if instead you gave somebody all of the Lego in the Lego store in one big box then they'd be a little confused and sometimes I think this is what keyboard maestro feels like it's giving you so many tools that you don't even know where to start well that's the goal of this field guide I'm gonna show you how to get started and some of the cool things you can do not only can you download the scripts I'm going to share with you with this you're going to know how to build your own so how is this organized there are several sections the first is going to be all about triggers what they are and how they work the next section is going to break down all of the available actions give you some descriptions and some samples I've got a separate section on palettes because they're so useful I thought they deserve their own section and once you get through that you're gonna find one of the hidden features of keyboard maestro a lot of people don't understand then we're gonna talk about debugging because there is a little bit of programming in here but trust me by the time we get there this is not gonna be too much for you and then my favorite part of this entire field guide it's basically all of my favorite scripts I'm gonna break them down for you show you how I built them give you download links and teach you how they work hopefully you'll be able to use all of mine and maybe make a few of your own then we're gonna go through the settings and finally we'll get to the conclusion right now you may feel like you've got a lego all over your desk right now but don't worry about it we're gonna put these things together and make something awesome so what are we waiting for let's go alright let's build our first keyboard maestro macro I've got the application open we're going to create a sample group so go down to the bottom button here and hit the plus sign and we just created a group and if any of these steps are confusing don't worry about it we're gonna explain all of them in later videos but I just wanted to make one to begin with we're gonna give it a name sample group and then inside that sample group we're gonna make a simple keyboard maestro script hit the plus button again and we're gonna make this one to hide all applications have you ever looked at your desktop and seen it as a complete mess and just wanted to hide everything you can hide apps by hitting command H on the Mac but what if you wanted to hide them all so we're gonna say hi it all we're gonna create a trigger for that it's gonna be a hot key and we'll type in control option command H and now I've made a trigger so I've hit control command option H something needs to happen in this case I want to hide all the open windows so now I'm gonna click new action and it's gonna open up this list of actions and you can get lost in this list but we're not gonna do that we're going to a search just type hide and you can see there's a command for hide all applications I'll double click it and it's just been added there's some complications here if you want to add some to an excluded application list we're not going to do any of that stuff we've just created a simple action that you hit control command option H it hides all applications now let me mess up my desktop and show it to you in action okay now I have a messy desktop it got a bunch of apps here let's say the day is ending and I want to just hide them all and leave it clean I'm gonna hold ctrl option command H and just like that it's clean this is a really simple example we're gonna get to stuff much more complex as we go through the course but I bet you can already see how useful keyboard maestro can be you okay let's start our exploration of keyboard maestro triggers and the most important of those are really the keyboard based triggers so we're gonna go ahead and create a group and we'll call that group a sample triggers and now we've created it right here in the groups list and we're going to create a macro inside of that that we're going to call keyboard triggers I really think that keyboard triggers are the most important type of triggers I using keyboard maestro because it's just so easy to fire these things off with your keyboard and I'm going to talk more about the ways I do that after I demonstrate a few but we've created it a macro here for keyboard triggers and this tutorial is going to be all about creating those triggers but we need something to happen on screen so I'm gonna add a couple actions here text related so we're gonna make one i just searching text here there's display text that's what we want and we can do that a couple ways we can say boom and we can say display large text and i'll just show you what it looks like whoa that fills the screen I'm not sure we want to do that so we're gonna switch that over to display text in a window so let's test that there it is a window pops up that says boom inside of it and just for giggles we're gonna say speak text as well I can type in the text here we can pick a voice I'll pick Alex and let's test that boom all right Alex hit boom how do you like that okay so we want to set that now we've got an action let's do some keyboard triggers which is the whole reason we started this like I said my favorite is the hot key trigger it works so great I'm going to create one for this which is gonna have the B key attached to it but it's also gonna say control option command that's the three keys to the left of the spacebar so I hold all three of those down i press b and i've just added that here control option command B triggers the boom command and it's turned on so everything should work so I'm gonna test it out I'm gonna hold down the three keys hit B boom and it worked I just held down the key combination and there you go this combination of control command option + one letter is a great one because applications don't generally use that and you've got the whole keyboard in front of you to work with that and if you've got an extended keyboard like I do with a number pad that gives you even more options because all those number pad keys register differently let's see here I'm gonna change it to control option command 3 and you can see it's keypad 3 it's not the number 3 just think about that it's a good reason to get yourself an extended keyboard if you've been putting it off but I'll go ahead now and try that out control option command 3 boom and it's still working and I can already tell this this voice thing is gonna make me crazy I'm gonna select that and get the little blue outline around it and press the Delete key and now I will just see boom and we will not hear it so there you go the the simplest method is this key combination and I use this all the time it's my favorite way to do these things now as a quick aside you can also add a super key to your caps lock key and I got this trick from my friend Brent terpstra Brent terpstra is an automation nerd he co-wrote two books with me about mac tips the 60 tips vol 1 and 2 and he came up with the idea or at least published the idea about using the hyper key and that's taking the caps lock key and turning it into control option command shift so all four of those Keys held down gives you a whole nother set of keyboard shortcuts that nobody else uses and Brett did this by using an application called carabiner elements I'll put a link in the description of this specific course brent actually went through and showed you how to change the JSON file and make it all work well good news is it's got even easier than since Brett did it this is the downloaded carabiner elements application I got from the link I shared below and if you go over to the complex modifications tab you can say add rule and this kind of couple built in and one of the built-in ones which I've already enabled is this one change caps lock to command control option + shift all I do is turn that on once I did that now my caps lock key operates a shift control command option all held down at the same time and that gives me a whole nother set of keyboard shortcuts I can use in keyboard maestro so now I'm gonna go back to this keyboard triggers one and in fact I'm going to add one more trigger because you can have multiple triggers even of the same sort and I'm gonna hold down my caps lock key and then press B and you can see when I did that it used because of carabiner elements instead of saying caps lock B it says control option shift command B and even though that's a lot of modifier keys I'm easily pulling it off with just my caps lock and my B key so one more time caps lock and press B and then they get my boom again so that's one way you can do these things with these hotkeys and like I said put the carabiner elements installed between that and the option control command you've got a lot of stuff to work with you got a lot of real estate on your keyboard and once again if you have the extended keyboard with a number-pad it gets even better so I've got those enabled let's try the next type of keyboard related trigger the type string trigger and this one lets you fire off a keyboard my stroke and just because you typed something in and I'm gonna go semicolon B boom is only four letters I got to keep it pretty short but if I hit semicolon plus B it's gonna make this thing happen so a tab key and then hit semicolon B and it happened now when I did that you heard there were some alerts because I wasn't in a text box on my Mac and usually the Mac gives me an alert when I'm trying to type and I'm actually not in a text box it's for this reason that I'm not a big fan of using the typed string trigger for keyboard Maestro macros it just doesn't work a lot of times because I'm not in a place that I have to type I hear all those alerts it gets confusing and I've got plenty of real estate left to use just hotkeys to do most of this stuff where it does work however is if you want to do text replacement type macros so I'm gonna go back now and close this out and close that and now that we're in this group of sample triggers we're going to make another sample trigger and this one's going to be a text replacement one of my favorite Latin Saints now I'm going to create a trigger and when you use a type string semicolon darts so now I've created a text replacement macro but it's not really doing what I want because rather than display text in a box what we want to do is take that text and just type it and you can do that here just change it to insert text by typing or pasting and use pasting that works just as well so now I'll open TextEdit and then the semicolon dars and I've got my text replacement people often ask me if you can use keyboard maestro as a text replacement application and the answer is yes however it's not as powerful as something like text expander that has macros and JavaScript and a bunch of cool stuff I generally prefer text expander for text expansion but if you're just doing basic stuff you can do it fine with keyboard maestro regardless of whether you use hotkeys or type strings you'll be surprised how often your keyboard maestro macros are easily triggered with the keyboard and just how useful it is make sure you understand this as you go forward because it's going to be something we use throughout the entire course the keyboard maestro clipboard is actually very powerful it can hold a history of items you've selected and then section six I've got a whole video on how to get the most out of the keyboard maestro clipboard but this screencast talks about actions with the clipboard and you can perform specific actions on the content so I'm gonna add a new action here in this clipboard actions script and you can see I've already selected the clipboard and there's all these things I can do you know we've got the normal cut copy and paste but you can also set it to text we can set the clipboard to a past clipboard which you'll see better in the section 6 chapter you can delete the system clipboard that's one that is useful after maybe you type in a password and you want to get it off your clipboard you can cut the name clipboard you can paste it you can apply styles to a clipboard in fact that's something that we use at length in the text actions that I cover in section 6 where we can take the contents of a clipboard and say ok we'll take the system clipboard and we will apply a strikethrough to it or we'll make an underlying on it or change the color you can also run it through the BB edit text factory if you have that there's a filter that you can apply to the contents of your clipboard and these are really great again for text tools and once again I have a whole screencast on that later so just to give you an idea there's a lot you can do to text on your clipboard here in keyboard maestro and then finally they have the usual suspect search and replace but search and replays using regular expressions the display clipboard is a separate action which you can do where you can see this historical clip or much better than what the Mac OS has built in and we're going to talk about that at length in this video I've been teasing throughout this screencast in section 6 the big point of this one is that once you put something in your clipboard you can use these actions to perform some magic on them frequently I go to coffee shops and libraries to get work done and I always go in there with a specific plan usually it's a particular client contract or it's a max barky post or something I want to just get done at that remote location and the problem is I get there and I get distracted and things don't happen the way I want so I made a script to help me out and this one is triggered several ways I can trigger it with the hyper key and the C key in my head that's the coffee-shop mode but it also triggers automatically when I go and connect to a wireless network that has the name Starbucks Pete for a Pete's coffee or a library in it and these work for me if you go to different coffee shops or different places you want to use this you have to change these names but any one of these triggers can fire off this script and when it starts up it does a few things first it quits Tweetbot so i don't get tempted and it quits slack which is a place where I do a lot of my communications the next thing it does is it toggles the sound mute on there's nothing worse than being in a coffee shop or a library and having you know Miles Davis start like playing out of your computer and then you want to hide all applications and I do that for a reason so I I closed out the social media I turn off the sound I hide all the applications and then I run the setups palette that's that separate script and I cover that in a separate screencast just I'll invoke it here it just opens up that little palette so no matter what I want to do I can push a button and it'll set up my screens for the way I want to do that this is a great little script if you work remotely you're probably going to have to tweak it a little bit to your preferences go crazy okay that isn't for the free sample there is some more sample materials below at the bottom of the course description I hope you like it I'm really happy with this field guide at 76 videos for plus hours of content and downloadable scripts and keyboard master so you can play along with my scripts as you're learning and there's just so much Mac automation if you're ready to get serious about automating your Mac this is the course for you

Channel: MacSparky Video

Views: 8,820

Keywords: macsaprky, mac, keyboard maestro, automation, field guide

Id: 3QDS6w4uBCk

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019