A Macro Inspector window that tells you when the macro was created, last modified, and last used, along with statistics on how many times you’ve used it and how much time it has saved youĪ new Share button that makes it easy to share macros via email, Messages, and moreĪction groups that let you try, enable, or disable a batch of actions all at onceįinally, if you make heavy use of palettes to display your macros, themed palettes may be welcome, since they enable you to customize just how your palettes look.Autocomplete for text tokens, functions, variables, and search tokens.Other changes in Keyboard Maestro Editor include: Type part of the name to see a list of possibilities, and insert the desired action with a double-click. You’ve long been able to search for an action within the list, but even easier is a new keyboard shortcut - Command-Control-A - that brings up an Add Action bar. With so many actions to choose from, scrolling through the list in Keyboard Maestro Editor has become tedious. This contextual help sprinkled throughout the app makes it much easier to construct complex macros using previously unfamiliar actions. That’s accessible by choosing Help from the gear menu. The second thing to note is the link to the Switch/Case page on the Keyboard Maestro documentation wiki There are even a pair of copy commands for easy sharing of the action the screenshot of the Switch/Case action above was made by Copy As Image. First, a new gear menu in every action provides access to a variety of contextual operations you might want to perform on the action, such as trying it, disabling it, renaming it, and adding a color or a note (documentation within macros, yay!). Note two things about the previous paragraph. More smarts because it can determine if the clipboard, a variable, or some text contains a particular string or an image, and then execute sub-actions if so. Notably, a new Switch/Case action lets you give a macro
The most interesting include Type Modifier Key, Open 1Password Bookmark, Simulate Hardware Key, Set Keyboard Layout, Execute Swift Script, and Execute JavaScript for Automation. On the action side of the equation, Keyboard Maestro already had a vast number of actions to control nearly anything on your Mac, but 7.0 still manages to add a number of new and enhanced actions.
Of course, you can still use triggers that execute at login, when a volume is mounted or unmounted, at a specific time, when the Mac wakes, when you join a particular wireless network, and so on. In addition, standard Hot Key (and Device Key) triggers now support double-tap, triple-tap, and so on. New triggers in version 7.0 include a change in the focused window, a folder’s contents changing, the clipboard changing, and the Mac going to sleep. Most people think of triggers as keyboard shortcuts, but Keyboard Maestro boasts a large and growing set of triggers that can initiate macros. Changes fall into a few major categories: new triggers, new actions, Keyboard Maestro Editor changes, and themed palettes.Įvery macro has two basic parts - a trigger and an action.
Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s look at what’s cool about Keyboard Maestro 7, the major new release that Peter just put out after two years of free updates.
Although the specific macros I rely on today are a bit different, everything else I wrote there remains completely true, and if you’ve never quite understood the utility of macros or Keyboard Maestro in particular for automating repetitive tasks on your Mac, go read that article.
#1623: How to turn off YouTube's PiP, use AirPlay to Mac, and securely erase Mac drivesĪ little over two years ago, Peter Lewis of Stairways Software released Keyboard Maestro 6, and I sang the praises of macro software in general before describing that version’s new features (see “ Keyboard Maestro 6 Automates Web Pages, Adds Macro Syncing,” ).#1624: Important OS security updates, rescuing QuickTake 150 photos, AirTag alerts while traveling.#1625: Apple's "Far Out" event, the future of FileMaker, free NMUG membership, Quick Note and tags in Notes, Plex suffers data breach.#1626: AirTag replacement battery gotcha, Kindle Kids software flaws, iOS 12.5.6 security fix.