I’ve looked at everything from creating simple keyboard shortcuts to macros that automatically Tweet whatever you’re listening to on Spotify. Become familiar with the Keyboard Maestro actions so you know whether a task can be carried out by macros.So far in my tutorials on Keyboard Maestro, I’ve covered a huge number of the app’s features. This post briefly touches the surface of creating useful and reusable macros. Take the screenshot of the successful dialog, or the green alert, and use them in this condition. It tells the engine to pause running macro until the screen contains your selected image. Less ideal for flow control because you must test the accuracy intensively. To prevent that from happening, I have the macro to check the value of isSpeaking variable - True or False - and skip the macro if value is True. In Keep Writing macro, a user may cause the macro to read out the quotes simultaneously by pressing delete key multiple times. The library can check most situations - from application, menu item, and network name - but when the condition you want is not available, you can use this two methods to control the flow: You can minimize the amount of mistakes with action flows when building a complex macro. This macro lets me switch Google Chrome with hot key combination, but only when Google Chrome is running - in other words, Google Chrome stays inactive even when I’ve accidentally triggered the macro. Let’s use the macro that toggle Google Chrome below as example. Sometimes you want a macro to run only when certain conditions are met. If you want the sixth record of clipboard from the past, enter %PastClipboard%6% as the value. The number indicates the record of past clipboard. Enabling Save Clipboard History to Disk under preferences save your clipboard history across restarts and log outs.Īccess the clipboard history by entering %PastClipboard%1% in the macro actions text field. You can access clipboard history during runtime, but it’ll disappear when you log out or restart your computer. Access Clipboard HistoryĬlipboard is the common gateway to move values from one application to another. I later read the file path from the variable, randomly pick one line from the list of quotes, and save it to a new variable called Quote which is used by the Keep Writing macro to read out the text and displayed in notification.Īnother common use case, without involving scripting, is when you want to control macro flow which I’ll elaborate more later. In the example above, I save the file path in a variable known as Quotes Path. It’s handy when you want to reuse the value in other macros, shell scripts, or AppleScripts. Variable is where you store the permanent value where you use in almost any fields in Keyboard Maestro. When you find it difficult to produce an expected result, break the macro into smaller macros. Toggle Keep Writing Mode toggles the macro group.Keep Writing speaks the quote when user press delete key.Preferences stores macro configurations.These smaller macros produce only one result as listed: In my previous post, I shared an example of a complex macro built from some smaller macros. In other hand, macro that produces one result, like assigning clipboards to variables, can be easily reused in other complex macro. Macro that produces more than one result is unpredictable, and highly difficult to debug. It might be the indication of bad macro design. A Macro Better Produces One Resultīe cautious when you have more than one result in a macro. See if you can turn the process from few steps into single macro. As I grow accustomed with the actions library, I expand the macro to batch processing all the images from the source folder, rename them orderly, and save them into result folder. My first macro resizes an image in Photoshop into multiple sizes and exports it to Desktop. The point is to be familiar with the available actions in Keyboard Maestro. This global hot key ensures that you can cancel all the running macros to prevent damage to your works, escape infinite loop - thus avoid the urgency to restart your Mac. When building a macro, the expectation and result may differ. Instead, learn how to build useful macros that automate mundane tasks for you. You don’t have to know AppleScript to create a Keyboard Maestro macro.
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