Keyboard Maestro has some granular control over window arrangement. Combine that with the ability to trigger specific menu items, I can create a preset view for just about any folder.

For example, this macro opens my Notes folder and displays it sorted by last modification date. I use a minor “If Condition” trick to turn off the toolbar if it is visible. The “If Condition” looks to see if there is a menu item named “Hide Toolbar” available. If it is, then the macro triggers the menu item. The Macro subsequently repositions the window and sets the Arrange By Date Modified option.

Here’s a quick trick. There’s a KM action to toggle a macro group on and off. For me, this is handy while using macros to override some BBEdit functions. If I ever want to get back to the native functionality in BBEdit, I just toggle my BBEdit macro group.

The same macro reenables the BBEdit macro group.

Since migrating to Lion, I’ve noticed several of my Mail rules fail to run. I have a number of rules that tag and move incoming messages. Rather than waste time trying to figure out why the rules do not run properly, I just setup a scheduled Keyboard Maestro macro that runs the rules for me. So far, this seems to solve the problem.

Edit: Take out the “Activate Mail” step unless you want to drive yourself crazy.

Quick Keyboard Maestro macro. This one is for inserting a Markdown reference style link at the end of a document. The magic is that it also insert the link at the current position in the line and maintains the insertion position in the current line. It’s all made possible by BBEdit’s “Set Jump Mark” command.

Here’s the macro:

I have a similar macro for inserting footnotes in Markdown.

I have a new saying: “If you want something done right, just pique Dr.Drang’s interest.” There’s been constant improvement to this workflow and it’s interesting to see it evolve.

Here’s a bonus macro that creates Amazon affiliate links.[1] For this one, just copy the product link from Amazon and run the macro to extract the product item and create an affiliate link.[2]

Here’s the workflow:

1. Visit an Amazon product page
2. Copy the page link
3. Switch back to a document I want the link inserted in
4. Run the macro to have the affiliate link pasted in

Here’s the AppleScript:

Notes

When I’m logged into Amazon, the product page link has a different structure. The AppleScript needs to determine what kind of link I’ve copied. From what I can tell, Amazon product links have either a path that includes “/product/” or “/dp/” right before the product id. That’s what the AppleScript if-else statements are determining.

This macro also has an example of the Keyboard Maestro flow-control actions. If the AppleScript returns a failure, then KM will display a popup message rather than inserting text.

EDIT: I just realized, after using this macro for so long, that I forgot to include a try-catch block to reset AppleScript’s text delimiters. That’s just dumb.

Here are a few Keyboard Maestro macros that I find very handy. I call them “cheat sheets” but they are essentially a scratch pad system. This is made possible by the persistent nature of Keyboard Maestro variables. They persistent even through restarts.

The workflow for this system goes something like this:

1. Browse around and see some text I want to remember
2. Copy to clipboard and hit opt-cmd-V to bring up my scratch board HUD
3. Hit “b” to add the content to the cheat sheet

1. Later… hit opt-cmd-V and then “d” to get a pop-up window with the text.

The text can be edited and copied as well. The window can be left open without interfering with other macros. In fact, the window can be left open and the cheat macros used with other content. It’s like little temporary post-it notes.

I run two different macros for adding content to the cheat sheet. One macro appends the clipboard to the top and one replaces the content with the current clipboard.

And here’s the macro for displaying the text.

These macros only work with text. There is no image support. It’s a pretty darn fast way to collect a bunch of text and keep it readily available. The example in the screenshot was while I was working on an AppleScript and I want a quick “snapshot” of the current state.

I have a couple other macros that truly are cheat sheets. One displays the MultiMarkdown tags and another shows some of my less used TextExpander shortcuts. Of course, I keep this stuff in Simplenote too, but it’s much faster to lookup by hitting a couple of macro hotkeys than doing a search in NVAlt.

I couldn’t resist. This came up on Twitter and I already had a similar macro running. This Keyboard Maestro macro takes the current clipboard string and pastes it into any application and then simulates the left arrow key to move the cursor back to it’s original position. This macro should be application agnostic since it uses standard keyboard input and basic AppleScript functionality. The same functionality should be possible with TextExpander as well.

Github link to download macro

Enjoy, Eddie.

UPDATE: Here’s a different version that’s much faster. It’s just a bit of cursor finagling through simulating key presses. Probably not as nice as a key binding though.

Github link

Most people are familiar with the setting a Start Up item on Mac OS X and the new Lion behavior of relaunching apps that were open at the last restart is also great. But I’ve also experienced the problem where I’ve gone away on a trip only to have iTunes crash or shutdown for some reason. That means the AppleTV is no longer able to stream SuperWhy episodes from the media Mac and that’s a problem.

I have a Keyboard Maestro macro the simply checks every 10 minutes and launches specific applications if they are not running.

Now I could write a script to do the same and then schedule the script through Cron in the terminal, but why hassle. Keyboard Maestro makes it easy. I keep a “Cron” folder of macros that just run at a specific time. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

This walkthrough demonstrates how I use Keyboard Maestro to control applications that are not scriptable or have few exposed options.

This example creates some handy macros for quickly filing mail in Mail.app. It’s no where near the power of Mail Act-On but it does provide one of my most used features, which is hotkey triggered filling of Mail messages.

Macro Groups

Before getting into the details of macro creation, I want to describe how I organize my macros. The system is still evolving, but as my collection grows, careful organization and trigger settings become more critical.

I have a system for my macros. I keep related macros together. Not just by function, but by how they are triggered. I use a number of palette triggers that pop-up a palette of actions to select. I do this to reduce the number of keyboard shortcuts that I need to remember. But sometimes I want two palettes that might use the same or similar hotkey[1]. In this case I already have a Markdown palette that uses the opt-cmd-M hotkey and I want a new palette for Mail that also uses opt-cmd-M. Keyboard Maestro will handle this fine by showing an option for one palette or the other, but why waste key presses when I can customize the palette triggers

I don’t use Markdown functions in Mail. I often will compose lengthy emails in NVAlt using Markdown, but with normal Mail use, I just write in plain old text. In this case, I customize the two triggers to only function when appropriate. The Markdown trigger fires in every application except Mail and the Mail trigger on fires in Mail.

Mail Filer Macros

Now I have my two macro groups separated. I need some macros for moving mail items. I typically organize and name my macros according to function and trigger within a single group. I number my macros within a group and assign their hotkey to the matching number. For example, the Mail Filer macro group looks like this:

The number on the right is the macro trigger. Keep in mind that these macros are not available until their group palette is triggered by the opt-cmd-M trigger. That way, there are no conflicts between unrelated macros. When the palette is activated, I get a list and I can select an individual macro by hitting the corresponding number key on my keyboard. I find this setup the most reliable way to keep a lot of macros with only a few key bindings.

Menu Action Macros

The heart of each of these macros is the the Select Menu action. This action provides access to a menu item many levels deep. Here’s an example:

It’s not necessary to manually enter all of the layers in a menu selection. Keyboard Maestro provides a recording functionality that will create the action when selecting a menu. It’s a handy way to build macros but it does record EVERYTHING. After completing the recording I also go back and delete all of the extraneous actions like mouse clicks and application switching.

This was a very simple macro for controlling an application without AppleScript. Keyboard Maestro has the capability to completely simulate human interaction. Anything that I can do with a mouse and keyboard, I can likely script with KM.

Hi MPU visitors. Thanks for stopping by.

You can find a bunch of Keyboard Maestro related links on my public Pinboard with the _KM_MPU tag. Otherwise, poke around and try building some cool stuff with Keyboard Maestro. Comments are always welcome.