Use Text Expander, Keyboard Maestro & Stream deck for Max Productivity

if you want to level up your mac productivity then stick around because in this video i'm going to be talking about how you can use text expander keyboard maestro and stream deck together hello welcome to take one tech my name's alec and in this video we're going to be basically combining three of my favorite productivity tools now i did a beginner's guide to stream deck so you can find that in my stream deck playlist i'll leave a link up in the top corner i also did an introduction to keyboard maestro about a week ago and so i'll leave a link to that video in the top corner as well and just yesterday or the day before i can't remember now i did a video about text expander and that was kind of an introduction to that piece of software so link up in the top corner as well and uh the point of those two videos for text expander and keyboard maestro is that they are intended to be an initial step in building out a sort of beginner's guide and then moving on to an advanced productivity guide where i basically combine all of these things well that was the plan but somebody's actually asked how to use these together or specifically how to use text expander with stream deck and the way i do it actually involves keyboard maestro as well so i thought i will just jump ahead a little bit to answer this question and it'll give you a bit of an insight into what is possible and then i'll go on to do all of the rest of the introductory videos for uh text expander and the keyboard maestro and then yeah as i say i'll be building this all out into a whole series of workflows uh using these tools but then also combining them with things like moom and also applescript and also apple's automator program as well so let me start by just refreshing on where we left off with the text expander video so as i say if you haven't watched that then you can see that i'll link to it previously and also it will be in the description as well but i will just recap on exactly what was done in there because i'm going to show you how you can trigger these things with stream deck as well because i do use text expander and have some of my snippets triggered with stream deck so let's have a look at how to do this so i'll come into my screen sharing and immediately share the wrong part of my screen this is the one that i want to share so this is text expander and these are the little examples that i created in the last video so we had a an initial snippet which uh just to refresh your memory uh if you didn't see it as well was if i type f comma comma it automatically expands out to put a date stamp which i'd specified here so that's taking the actual date and then also a bit of text afterwards there was some other ones that i did in there as well so we'll come on to those as well in fact the other two the next two were really just more of the same really so a little snippet of text expanding to some more text the last one though the one that i did with the company information that was a bit more interesting and let me just give you a quick preview of that one and we'll get on to doing both of these in a moment so i want to do a new mail and i'm going to put my mail up there and the point of this snippet here was that if i come down and grab an email address this was the example that i used here was if somebody says can you send me some of your company information then we created this snippet so if they give us their email address then i can just come in here and type a little shortcut which was xcomma and textexpander will ask me for the name of the person so i'll just say that i'm going to send it to myself and as soon as i press return it populates the email address it went and put the subject in it tabbed down to the main body of the email it entered the the name of the person that i just put in and then gave the company information whatever that was and so then you are free to send it well i'm going to show you how to take this to the next level because basically uh we don't need to be doing all this stuff ourselves we don't need to be pressing return and send and things like that we can automate all of that using keyboard maestro and stream deck and all we need to do is just actually grab the uh email address and then press a button and it will do the rest for us so that's what we're going to automate today as well but let me come back to the uh uh the simple one first so uh we don't need that so what i'm gonna do is just come back to this first snippet and show you how i would do that in uh stream deck the name of slipped my memory completely for a moment there in stream deck so um let's come over to stream deck for a moment because uh you may think that stream deck itself can do this sort of stuff this text expansion and indeed for very basic stuff it can do that so let me just come over to the stream deck screen this is the right screen this time so in the system section of the stream deck we have got a thing here which is text so if i drag that onto the screen like that um here what you can do is you can give it a title so i'm going to call this little test snippet and we could write here this is a stream deck snippet if i can spell right so where here we've got a little part section of text and so if i bring my little note pad area down here one second just get it onto this screen so now if i come down to an empty part of here and i press this button on my stream deck then it does indeed expand out that piece of text so it can do some basic stuff but you are limited with the number of characters you've got so for example here you can see that the character limit on stream deck itself is uh 500 characters whereas on street on textexpander it's i don't want to say it's limitless i'm sure there is a limit but i certainly haven't run into it and i do all sorts of things like contracts and proposals and all sorts on it so um you could do a lot more with uh text expander basically you can also do formatted text and things like that and you can do more advanced things like i showed you with that email where it basically fills out different fields and tabs through them and so on so that is why textexpander is far more versatile than using the built-in functionality in uh stream deck so you may think that in order to trigger a text expander snippet could we just actually create a snippet in stream deck and let me just move this out of the way so you could think if i put in the text here and then i type the snippet so our um little shortcut for that was f comma comma so if i was to put f comma comma in there then you might think that by pressing this button now it would actually trigger the snippet but uh the the text expander snippet that i used as an example that is but if i actually press that all it does is it just puts in the text because rather than um typing it it is just simulating pasting it so it's not simulating the actual keystrokes and textexpander is looking for those simulated keystrokes in order to trigger the text expansion uh and it won't do it just by pasting in the values so this is where keyboard maestro comes in now don't worry this is pretty uh basic that we're going to do now in keyboard maestro so there's nothing uh too difficult and i know that some keyboard maestro aficionados are going to say why would i be using text expander when actually keyboard maestro can do text expansion so we could just do it all in keyboard maestro well there is a reason and that is that um textexpander is very good at what it does and so i do all of the things related to text expansion from within text expander there are a few occasions when i also want these little snippets and these uh snippets of text and whatever i want those to be available on the stream deck so in those few cases what i do is i create a little keyboard maestro macro that basically triggers the snippet for me but that way i always know if i need to find my text expander or my little text snippets i know where they're going to be so that is why but it is true you could actually do a lot of this in just purely with keyboard maestro and stream deck so you may think it's a little bit of a an extra step but i'm hoping that it does make sense so i've got a little uh dummy group in keyboard maestro and as i say if you uh haven't seen the keyboard maestro video yet then do go and check that out because i go over the sort of basics of this but this is as bad as basic as it comes for this first one at least anyway so what we're going to do is i've got my groups here and i've just got a little demo group of macros so i'm going to create a new macro and all we want to do is we want to actually create a macro that's basically going to type that little string of text and all i wanted to type in this case in the case of this particular snippet is i want it to type this f comma comma in fact i'm just going to come here and i'm going to actually copy that right now because that's the abbreviation that we want it to trigger so coming back to our keyboard maestro we don't actually need to put a keyboard shortcut for this because i'm gonna i'm only using this to trigger it from stream deck so i'll show you how we do that in a moment so uh there's no point to create a a separate trigger in uh keyboard maestro because we've already got the trigger in in text expander so let's go and add a new action which is basically we just wanted to type this string of letters so i'm going to go to new action and then i'm going to come in here and just start writing type in the search field and here we've got a few options we can either type a modifier key so that's either command control or shift or whatever you can type a keystroke so that would be if you wanted to simulate typing a keyboard shortcut like i don't know command s or something like that or command c for copy or whatever it happened to be um there's also insert text by pasting and that would simulate basically what text exp sorry that would simulate what stream deck is doing by just pasting a block of text but this is the one that we want we want to text um sorry to insert text by typing so this is going to simulate the behavior of you just typing it yourself so i'm going to double click on that one and all i'm going to do in here is add in the text string so there we go that is the text string that we've got for our tic uh trigger for text expander i'm hoping that this is making sense so let's give this a name and i'm just going to call this test again just for uh in fact it was called first snippet was the way that i described it in text in textexpander so let me call it the same there we go so now we've got a little action in keyboard maestro called first snippet and it's going to type this string of text t comma comma so if i come back to my text expander here this is called first snippet and it's activated by typing t comma comma so what we're going to do now is we're going to use stream deck to actually activate this keyboard maestro action okay so i'm going to move that out of the way and what we're going to do is we're going to come into our stream deck and what we need to have is we need to be able to control keyboard maestro from stream deck so i'm going to come up to the little plus icon here and what we're going to look for is there is keyboard maestro i mentioned this in the introduction video so there is a keyboard maestro plugin and this is to trigger a macro in keyboard maestro but you can also use it the other way around to have keyboard maestro trigger some of the actions that you've got in your stream deck however i don't usually do that what i do is i'm only interested in triggering the things on keyboard maestro and i have found that there is another plugin there's a third party plugin called km link and there you go and this is for me much better and you'll see why in a moment i've already installed it but if you haven't then just click on the install button now when you install uh plugins to stream deck they usually appear down this side so like i installed ecom live and there we go we've got the ecom live plugin i've installed zoom and the zoom one is there well km link is one of these ones that's just only basically got one action and so that is appearing in here this custom a little section so there we've got a km link in there so now i'm going to add this down to this bottom button and you can see it's got the little keyboard maestro icon the command symbol and all you do is basically come down to here where it says select a macro and click here and you'll see all of your macros in keyboard maestro and it also highlights the last modified one right at the top so i'm going to click on here so now when i click that button it's going to activate the macro in keyboard maestro first snippet and that in turn is going to type our key string for our text expander snippet this is com it's confusing me talking through all this one step at a time i'm usually just flying through it without really thinking so let me come back to this now and what you'll see is where before it only typed out a string if i just press return onto a new line and i press this little button on my stream deck what you'll see is it does actually type the string and that expands into text as well so that is exactly the behavior that we wanted i feel like that was quite a long-winded explanation of basically saying we've just created a small little uh macro in keyboard maestro that simulates the le the uh the letter sequence to trigger our text expansion is that clear i don't know it should be clear but it might not be if there is any uh confusion about that then do just drop a message in the comments down below and let me know and i'll i'll see if i can explain it any differently i think i think i i think i explain the steps but there you go sometimes i confuse myself with these things now what we're going to do is we're going to tackle something to be honest that is a little bit more advanced because it is going to get into multi actions in keyboard maestro and what we're going to do is i'm going to come back to that example that i had of that email sequence so here we've got a a sequence that basically takes what we've got on the clipboard and it pastes it and in our case we went into the to field of the mail and then it tabbed down twice to go to the subject and it pasted in the subject that we'd written there and then it tab down to the main uh body of the email and it prompted us for a name so the name of the person so we put the name in and then it filled out the rest of the details and completed the email and then we were left to actually finish off the email by pressing uh return or rather send so what we want to do is we want to actually simulate that whole thing now in keyboard maestro so that all we have to do is actually just copy the email address that we want it sent to and then it will do everything else except prompters obviously for the name which we still need to put in manually so let's uh let's give this a go shall we i'm feeling ambitious [Laughter] okay so if we come back to keyboard maestro what i'm going to do now is take is create a snippet that uh sorry a macro that simulates that um that whole process that we've just uh just looked at so i'm going to create a new one and i'm going to call it the same as the text expander snippet is called which is company info mail as an example uh there we go and now what we're gonna do is um i'm not gonna bother with an actual trigger for this because we're gonna trigger it by stream deck but we're gonna add in a series of actions now uh this is gonna perhaps seem a little bit complicated possibly if you are totally new to keyboard maestro but it is just a series of simple actions and what we're doing is really still only going to be just scratching the surface of what is possible with keyboard maestro um but when you are looking at creating these things in keyboard maestro i mentioned on one of my last videos the point is not really to think about all the things you might want to do with it and then create them all at once and then probably forget that half of them even exist uh i'm speaking from experience um the re the way to go about this is to just find the things that you do in your day-to-day work uh or productivity or whatever it is uh where you you notice that you're doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again and see if there is a way that you can automate those and then it's a case of breaking them down into the set steps that you take to do them because keyboard my stroke can control really a hell of a lot of the things that you do and if there is a task that you do repetitively on your mac i can almost guarantee that you can program keyboard maestro to do it and all it is a case of is is it worth the time it takes you to program keyboard maestro uh to save you the time of having to do the task in future and i find if it's something you do more than a couple of times a month uh then it definitely is worth worth creating one so um and you will obviously get quicker at creating macros once you start doing it but we're going to go through now and do this process of basically what we want to do is we've got to copy the person's email address and then we want it to basically when we press our stream deck button it will do almost everything else the one thing we will have to do is we will we'll have to type the person's name manually there is a way that we could get that as a separate action but i won't complicate things for now so um what would be the first step that we'd have to do that's what we need to think about when we're creating these macros well we've copied the email address so the next step is we need to open mail so let's go and do that in this macro so i'm going to add a new mac a new mac a new action and i'm going to come and search for uh you can do open app but i'm going to use activate because then it's that's actually the better action to use it will open it if it's not open and it will just bring it to the foreground if it is already open so i'm going to look for activate so i'm going to start typing it and here you can see we've got activate a specific application and that's what we want because we want to activate our mail app so i'm going to click that down there and now we can select which application it wants it's defaulted to finder because that happens to be the other active window that i've got at the moment apart from keyboard maestro so i'm going to click on finder and i'm going to change that to mail so in the process we've now opened mail so what do we do now well we need to create a new email don't we so how do we do that well the short keyboard shortcut for that is command n so the same as a new document in word or whatever other program you're using command n is usually a new whatever it is for that application so command n is what we want to do we want to type a keystroke now if you remember before uh we did write type and what came up was this one type a keystroke and that's what we want that's for when we use keyboard shortcuts so we're not going to insert text by typing like we did before just yet at the moment we just want to basically press command n so i'm going to double click that one and then here it's dropped it in down here as you can see and what we want to do is simulate the keystroke and we don't want return so let's just delete that out and click in here and i can just type command n and now we've got uh command n so now in this process we've opened mail we've opened a fresh email or started composing a fresh email rather and when you do command n in mail it actually takes you to the to field so that's the the place where your cursor will be when you start a new mail that's perfect because that's just where we need to be in order to type our little text expander snippet to start that working now if you remember if i just come back to that this is the little snippet x comma so i'm just going to copy that from there and i'm going to come back to keyboard maestro so what we want to do now is now we want to trigger the snippet so we're going to come to here and do insert text by typing just like we did in the first example and i'm just going to paste in that little snippet of text now if you remember what is going to happen now uh when we're in a new email and we press the little uh keystroke it's going to actually bring up a little pop-up where we have to enter the name of the person and then we press return to continue to actually paste in all of the the different fields and that that's what text expander does now there is something to be aware of with keyboard maestro and pop-ups because that can actually sort of break the chain because keyboard maestros are waiting for an input and that can be the same like if you're doing things like using keyboard maestro to shut down programs for example if you try and shut down a program where you've got unsafe changes and it gives a pop-up then you have to be aware of that there's a little work around for this which i'll i'll tell you in another video but it will actually sort of stop the whole chain of events so we want to allow for this and so the way that we want to do this is we know that we're going to be basically having to do some action here because we've got to put the person's name in and then press return so what basically we want a keyboard maestro to just pause for a while to hold on until we've done our bit so fortunately there is a keyboard maestro uh action for this so if i type pause uh and we want to not just pause indefinitely we want to pause until basically we finish doing our thing so i'm going to click on this one pause until okay and it says uh here pause until all of the following are true well all we're waiting for is basically we're going to type the name and press return so really the only thing we're waiting for is until return is pressed now i can click on this add condition now let me just move this up here a little bit there are quite a lot of conditions to choose from and this just shows you how versatile keyboard maestro can be because there are so many different ways that you can program this it's also the reason why some people find it a bit daunting because you know there's almost too too much choice well what we want is we basically just want a until a key is pressed so we're looking for a specific key condition and the key condition we're looking for is as i say until we press return because once we've pressed return then we know we will have entered the name and then we're pressing return because we're ready for text expander to continue to populate the email so i'm going to come here and the key that we're looking for if i click in here and press that is now saying return and the state we can either have is either up or down so it's when it's down so as soon as we press return uh we basically want to on pause this routine that we've got here so we're going to do all these steps and then when we get to here keyboard maestro is just going to wait for us till we press return and then it will carry on doing its thing so what do we want it to do next well if you think about the steps in the process where we are we've now with text expander because that's what we're simulating we've now gone through the process of initiating the text expansion the pop-ups come up we will have put the name in and pressed return and then text expander if you remember will then go through and put in the email address it will tab twice to put in the subject and then it will tab again to the body and then it will put in you know hi with the name that we've entered and put in the body of the email and ordinarily we would have to then send the email so all of that doesn't happen instantaneously there is a bit of time that it takes after we press enter for it to populate all of those fields so although we've stopped it from uh it's unpaused in keyboard maestro we do want to have a bit of a delay before we actually try and send the email because otherwise all of the information won't be there it only takes about a second to for text expander to pop it uh populate it um but i'm just going to add a bit more of a delay in there so i'm going to come over to here and just add delay and uh here what we want to do is an action delay because this pause is technically an action and then we've got another action which is going to be to send the email but we want to pause we want to delay between the pause and the send if that makes sense so i'm going to click on action delay here now it only takes about a second to populate all of the information but just to be sure i'm going to allow three seconds because that's long enough that it will give it plenty of time for text expander to fill out all the details but it's not so long that it will feel like we're waiting for it to do its thing now what we want to do is here we've got this delay but we want to actually have a delay between actions so we can select a few different things here and we just want to select between actions so uh set a delay of three seconds between basically this action and the following one and the following action that we're going to add is basically a keyboard shortcut again because there's a keyboard shortcut in mail to send the mail which is command shift d uh so if i uh comment over here and i just come to uh type again we're gonna use the same thing that we've used before up here and we're going to type keystroke and the keystroke we're going to write is if i just come and click in this box and put command shift d now that is it essentially so that might have been a little bit tricky to follow i don't know maybe not but uh let's just have a look at what it's doing and bear in mind the process that we're going through we've copied somebody's email address we've got a text expander snippet that will do all this business of pasting it all into uh into an email but we want to automate this so that we can trigger it with our stream deck so we will have copied the email address and we press our button which we're going to program in a moment and keyboard maestro is going to open mail it's going to create a new email it's going to trigger the text expansion it's going to wait until we've typed in the person's name and press return and once we've pressed return it's going to wait again for another three seconds while text expander fills out all the details of the email and then it's going to press command shift d for us to actually fire off the email right so with a bit of luck let's move this out of the way and i'm going to create a button for this so i'm going to come over to here and i'm going to use my km link button again and i'm just going to call this one mail just so that we can see which is which now that we've got two of them on there and then we're going to come down to the macro and we want to trigger and if you remember the last modified macro always comes up so that's handy the company info mail so that's hopefully going to do what we want it to do so let me come over to uh another part of the screen for a moment i've got our email address here so i'm going to copy that let me just close this down and i'll just minimize this as well now if i press my button let's see what happens so i'm going to press the button it started a new mail it's triggered the textexpander snippet it's waiting now for me to type the name of the person in so i'm just going to type my name doesn't matter what i type and now when i press enter it gives it time for textexpander to work and then after three seconds it sends the mail so all i actually had to do there was i copied the email address i uh pressed the button and then i entered the name of the person and pressed return and then that's it it did everything else for me like i say that might have sounded a little bit complicated but what i want you to remember is it only took me uh however long i don't know 10 minutes to actually program that and once you get used to the sort of process and the flow of it then uh you'll find that you can actually create these quite quickly and that can save you all of that time going forward so 10 minutes spent now uh i've got macros like this that are set up and i've got some that are a lot simpler and some that are far more complicated but i spent a bit of time sort of figuring it out once and they have saved me i'm talking about literally days and days and days of of work when you add it all up when you start doing these things regularly it's literally saving days out of your life it's quite quite frightening when you start to think about how much time you spend doing some of these things i will uh do some more advanced ones than this as well a little bit further down the line but i'm hoping that that very sort of simple example that i gave to start with and this slightly more complicated example uh just sort of start to make you understand the sorts of things that are possible with it because it really is one of those things that your mind is the only limitation once you start getting into it because you can really do all sorts with text expander and uh sorry with keyboard maestro you can have it simulate clicks on a particular part of the screen you can have it open a website go to a particular field on the website enter information go to grab other information it's like it's it it really boggles the mind what you can do with it but i'm hoping that that shows you how you can use keyboard maestro and text expander and the stream deck together with those sort of three uh three little parts working together it allows you to activate these things quite quite simply from uh from stream deck and like i say once you've set them up once just duplicate them and change the actions that you want to trigger with them i hope that helps if there are any unanswered questions or you've got it has raised further questions then please feel free to leave them in the comments and if you've got any specific use cases that you would like to say yeah but how about this or how about that leave them down in the comments as well i'm more than happy to make these videos you know specific for particular use cases in fact a lot of the videos i've made recently have been because people have specifically reached out to say how do you do this or how do you do that so if you are asking the question believe me there will be hundreds or thousands or millions of other people asking the same not on my channel they'll be about no more than well i think it's 372 maximum at the moment but there you go speaking of which if you haven't already subscribed no look at that for a segway hey ever the professional uh go down hit the subscribe button also turn on notifications so that you get alerted the second i release any more keyboard maestro goodness to the to the internet and this is going to form the basis of as i say a whole series of uh mac productivity videos as well so i'll leave a link to the uh the playlist for all of these related apps as well over on the the right hand side don't go anywhere there's plenty more coming up not not least that playlist but there'll be another video up for you in the top right as well

Channel: Take One Tech

Views: 978

Keywords: Text Expander, Keyboard Maestro, Stream Deck, Mac Productivity, Productivity, productivity apps, productivity hacks, productivity setup, MAc Productivity apps, Mac Productivity Setup, Keyboard Maestro and, keyboard maestro and stream deck, Text Expander and Stream Deck, Keyboard Maestro and Text Expander, keyboard maestro mac tutorial, keyboard maestro tutorial, Stream Deck KM Link, How to use keyboard maestro with streamdeck

Id: EGW1oCVLG48

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021