Revisiting Keyboard Maestro

Hello, and welcome to MacPower Users. My name is Stephen Hackett, and I have the pleasure of being joined by my friend and your friend, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How are you today? I am good. I'm good, getting near to the end of the year here. Yeah, today we're going to be talking about one of my very favorite apps, Keyboard Maestro. So I'm very happy, was enjoying working on this outline. We're going to spread the good news about Keyboard Maestro today on the Power Users. Yeah, that's right. A little bit of housekeeping first. Since we're doing a Keyboard Maestro episode, David, you're going to do something cool with the field guide, right? Yeah, I mean, this was a last minute decision. If you're listening, don't say, ah, he's doing an episode so he can sell field guides. It's actually just kind of the opposite. I realized when doing the outline a couple of times I mentioned that, oh yeah, I talk about this further in the field guide. There is a Keyboard Maestro field guide that exists. It's up to date. It's good. If you use the code HARTKM, just spell that out, H-E-A-R-T-K-M, you get 20% off. I'll make that good through the end of the year. Is that apologetic enough? I don't know. That's great. Yeah, all right, yeah. Fantastic. I'm putting a sale on the field guide since we're covering it today. Yeah. And we are also doing our sale on memberships. So we do something called More Power Users. It's a longer ad-free version of the show. And you can get that 20% off until the end of the year. So you'll go to giverelay.com. There's a link in the show notes to go check that out. And that goes to support us directly. The ad market's up and down. Membership has become really important for shows like ours. And so we would appreciate it if you would go check it out. And thank you all who have joined. It's been a great sale so far across the network. And very excited to have more people joining. Yeah, great time. It's still time for Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever. If someone says, what do I get you? Say, get me an ad-free year of Steven and Dave talking about geeky Mac stuff. Why not? Get a good deal. Today on More Power Users, speaking of More Power Users, we're going to go in on our holiday light setup because mine has evolved. And I know Steven has gotten a new house. So we thought it would be fun to talk about exactly how we're rigging the lighting for the holidays. So we're going to do that today in More Power Users. Yeah, yeah. I got Christmas lights everywhere. OK, Keyboard Maestro, Steven. This app is so great. I thought I actually went in deep on this one on the history of Keyboard Maestro. So I guess if you've never heard of it, although I doubt very many people in my audience have heard of this, but Keyboard Maestro is an automation app for the Mac. It just works on the Mac, but it is blessed. It does some really great stuff. They're currently on version 11. And did you know Keyboard Maestro has been in development over 20 years now? I mean, it's one of those apps that as long as I've used the Mac, I feel like it's been around. I mean, you're talking 20 years. That's like the early days of OS X. It really is a hall of famer when it comes to automation tools. Yeah. So it was released in 2002. I looked this up. Sal Seguin, we've had on the show, he's the guy behind the moving force at Apple between Mac Automator, which was kind of the Lego brick style automation where you've got a trigger and an action. I had always thought that Automator came first, but when I was researching the show, actually Keyboard Maestro came first. Automator came out in 2005 with Tiger. So this was really one of the first big kind of user-friendly automation tools. I mean, AppleScript goes back to 1993. Shortcuts on the Mac, the newcomer, wasn't there till 2021. But Keyboard Maestro was there early as a form of automation. And it's a great app, a good pricey model, $36. You buy it, there's no subscription. And then every couple of years, he comes out with a new version with a $25 upgrade. So it's not going to break the bank to get into this. But man, it can really change your game in terms of automation. We're going to get into that stuff in the show today. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the good things about that longevity is that it can interact with a bunch of different systems on Mac OS, where sometimes the newer tools like Shortcuts, like you kind of hit a wall. It's like, no, I know Mac OS can do more, but I can't reach it with Shortcuts. And because Keyboard Maestro's been around for so long and worked on for so long, it knows about everything in the system, which is really powerful. Yeah, it really is kind of the master tool for this. But it's also a great complement to Shortcuts. In teaching this stuff for years now, I've had a lot of customers who started in Shortcuts, and then they hit the glass ceiling, and then they go to Keyboard Maestro. But there's still room for Shortcuts. I mean, I think the more automation, the better. It's got one developer, Peter. And I've actually invited him on the show, but he doesn't really want to go on interviews and stuff. He's just a coder. He's not into that. But he does a great job with this app. Some of my favorite apps, like BB Edit, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, all of these apps have one developer that's very passionate about it, makes his entire living on this app, and just keeps making it better. And Peter's one of those. But he was not the original developer. Did you know that? I did not know that. I was reading over your notes, and I was like, huh. I had no idea. Yeah, so when Keyboard Maestro first came out, it had a different developer. Peter was a power user and wrote to the developer who said, hey, how come you haven't done an update? And the guy said, well, I think I'm going to give up on this project. And then Peter took it over in 2004, if my numbers are correct. And ever since then, so now over 20 years, he's been improving it. They're now, like I said, at version 11. And yeah, I can't really say enough about small indie developers and the Mac platform. It's like peanut butter and chocolate. They really go together well. Mm-hmm. That longevity does come with questions, right? In fact, we took questions from the audience over on the MPU forums. We have some of those sprinkled throughout the show. And one question we got is, what's the plan for Keyboard Maestro when Peter retires? And I don't know the answer to that. That's always something to think about when you look at these small indie developers, especially on the Mac that's been around longer. I hope Peter's got years left on this app. And when it's time, I hope that someone can keep moving it forward. But for now, it doesn't keep me away from it. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it for now. It's just so useful. I mean, it solves problems that other tools don't solve. That's really what makes it great. But yeah, Keyboard Maestro is one of the gems of automation. And it has continued to evolve. And version 11 came out with a bunch of new features. I'm sure when version 12 comes out, there'll be even more. I guess we should kind of get into it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Let's get to some use case for beginners. If you're just downloading this for the first time, or maybe you're using shortcuts and you're hitting that wall, how do people approach this app? Because I do think, to be completely fair, Keyboard Maestro and some other apps sort of in this category, they can be a little intimidating at first. Now, once you get in there and understand how it works, I don't think it is. But I think that on-ramp can be a little steep when it comes to tools like this. And so someone just starting out, what are some of the basics? What are some of the use cases you see being there in those early days? Well, I really think, getting back to my earlier point, it really is a trigger and action automation tool. And that is really the easiest way to get into this stuff. The app has a bunch of triggers. Like you can say, when I push a keyboard combination, or at a certain time of day, or I type a certain phrase on my keyboard, or I push a button on my MIDI keyboard, that's the trigger. And then there's a list of actions you can do. Like anything from as simple as press a keystroke to run an AppleScript and everything in between. And the trick with these tools is to understand what the triggers are and what the actions are. Get those under your skin. And I'm not going to keep talking about the field guide, but that's the first thing I do in the field guide, is I go through all the triggers and all the actions. You need a working knowledge of what you can trigger and what you can act on. And then from there, you just start solving your problems. Yeah, and we're going to have a bunch of links in the show notes, and we'll do your field guide, definitely, but also a lot of pages on the Keyboard Maestro wiki. That's another thing that this app benefits from, from its longevity, is the community around it is spectacular. The first-party documentation, the third-party, or I guess sort of first-party forums, lots of great stuff in here. And just scrolling through the page for triggers just for a second, it is, the depth here is just unbelievable. You mentioned a few. One that I spent some time with this time around was USB devices appearing and disappearing from the system. Like, you can use, oh, I plug in this drive, something happens. We had a listener question about that that we'll answer a little bit later on. Those sorts of things, it's easy to think about this, and I think the way a lot of people start is, OK, when I type this, I want this to happen, or I push this button, I want things to happen. But unlocking these more sort of esoteric triggers, if you will, do open the opportunity for more interesting automation. And so, for instance, if you sit down at your desk and you plug in a network cable, or you join a wireless network at the office, you can use that as a trigger to tell your system, OK, I am now at work. And that means I want this, this, and this to happen automatically. When I go through, I have probably over 1,000 keyboard maestro macros that I've generated over time. Just as an example, in my mail application, sometimes people send me an email that I want to acknowledge but not really write a long reply to. And I don't know if you recall that, at one point, this app Spark had a thing where you could reply with an emoji. You push a button, and it sends an emoji back as a reply. That's awesome. You recall that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's pretty cool. Well, no, let me tell you what I did, because I went a step further. What I did was I took screenshots of all of my, what's it called, the emoji? You know, the ones where it's a little David, and he's got his thumbs up? Memoji. My Memoji, yes, that's it. So I took screenshots of them all. Like, there's the one of me behind the Mac, there's one of me cursing, there's one of my head blowing up. And I created a macro that only works in the mail app that hits Command-R, which is the reply button. Then it pastes the appropriate Memoji clipping into the reply, and then hit Shift-Command-D to send it. So I just hit one keyboard shortcut, and I reply with the emoji. I added a feature to Apple Mail, and the trigger is a keyboard shortcut. And that's the kind of stuff. I mean, you can do goofy things like that, but you can also do really complex things. I just made a MacroSparkyLabs video. Great guy on the forums, Jim Sauer, made a script with Keyboard Maestro that you press one keyboard shortcut, and it creates a deep link to an Apple Note. You know, it's something we always struggle with. You can kind of do it. Apple gives you the tools to do it, but it's really backwards. He wrote a keyboard macro, and he's using AppleScript and a whole bunch of tools to do this. They basically added a feature to Apple Notes where you can easily get a link to your note with one keystroke. And I'll put a link to that into the notes as well so you can go directly to it. But it's just a tool that kind of runs the whole gamut. One thing I think that people sort of, when they're learning Keyboard Maestro, is sort of an aha moment, as you put it in our notes, is the ability to chain actions together. As your example of your reply with an emoji in mail is a perfect example, right? I want to insert this, and then I want to send the mail. That's something that other tools don't do as well as Keyboard Maestro, I think. I think particularly in shortcuts can struggle with the sort of multi-step action. And Keyboard Maestro, I think, really excels in that. Yeah, it just makes this stuff fairly easy. And like I said, there is an on-ramp. You've got to get past, like, you've got to kind of figure your way around the interface. Very much a Mac app, but it does start to open up when you do like chaining actions. Another thing is he makes it very easy to create custom variables, which you can do in shortcuts, but not to the extent you can do it in Keyboard Maestro. Even like his input box that he put in it where you can have like an interface open up, and you can fill in four variables in one box. And it's just like the kind of stuff like that you can't really do. So it almost feels like you're straddling the line between automator and developer as you get better at using this tool. Yeah, there are several different sort of goodies within Keyboard Maestro. You mentioned the variables. The clipboard tools, I think, are another great one to play with. You have the system clipboard, right? That's the clipboard that Mac OS itself handles. But if you go through and like, and read the documentation on it, in the Keyboard Maestro wiki, for example, the system clipboard is actually kind of complicated and can sometimes keep data in structures or in ways that you might not expect. And so you can have an alternate clipboard that Keyboard Maestro can talk to. And this lets you do a bunch of interesting things that can change or affect what's on the system clipboard or use what's on the system clipboard. But you can also bypass that. So you can do things like maybe you wanna wait until the clipboard has been set, right? So you can actually pause your action until the clipboard is ready. And then once it's ready, Keyboard Maestro can move forward. We've talked a lot about clipboard history over the last couple of months because Spotlight gained it in Mac OS Tahoe, but it's good in Spotlight, but it's a little basic compared to what some other things can be. And one of the cool things that Keyboard Maestro does is that it allows you to save your clipboard history to your drive. So one thing I do all the time in Alfred, which is what I use for my clipboard manager, is I may load up a bunch of stuff and then go back, I'm gonna copy a block quote, a URL, and the author's name. And then I go to MarsEdit, I'm gonna do a link list post on the blog and I have all that and I can just paste through them. But even in Alfred, there's a history to that, right? And if something falls off the end of its list, then it's gone, right? Same thing with Spotlight, right? They give you those options for time. I think initially it was just eight hours and now it's longer. But with Keyboard Maestro, you can have that clipboard history just written out to a file. And what that means is that if Keyboard Maestro is quit and then relaunched, like you restart your computer, that history stays with it. It's a great way to sort of manage some of the edge cases you run into with Spotlight, Alfred, or other tools. Yeah, and just to go a level deeper on clipboard with Keyboard Maestro, you can also create custom clipboards. Like when I talked about my little Memoji response, I have created a custom clipboard for each emoji I'm clipping. So there's a separate clipboard in Keyboard Maestro for each one of those, like the happy one, the thumbs up one, the hearts one, all that stuff. And then what I'm doing in that script is I'm just calling the custom clipboard that I've designated for the different Memoji shots. Because Apple doesn't let you paste a Memoji on the Mac. You can do it on the iOS, but you can't do it on Mac. So I basically kind of cheated my way around that using Keyboard Maestro. Another thing about clipboards that people don't realize is Keyboard Maestro, to my knowledge, is the only app where you can perform actions on the clipboard in the clipboard. So as an example, I have a lot of, I do a lot of dictation. And until recently, most dictation tools could never get Max Barkey right. Like it was like Max, M-A-X, Barkey, B-A-R-K-E-Y, or it was like, it was just some weird variation of Max Barkey. Recent tools have actually got much better at that, but this has been an ongoing thing for me. So I made a Keyboard Maestro script and it searches the clipboard for all the misspellings of Max Barkey that I've ever seen. And if it sees any of those in the clipboard, it replaces that text with the proper spelling in the clipboard. So when I trigger that script or that macro, it fixes misspellings in my clipboard. Cause often I'll dictate like into drafts and then I'll copy that to the clipboard. And before I paste it into WordPress or wherever I'm going to publish it, I'll just have Keyboard Maestro clean the clipboard in memory basically, and then paste it in, which to me is like a nerd level. Like it makes me happy thinking that I'm fixing this, but not actually seeing it get fixed. You know what I mean? It's like happening in memory. It's like a flex, right? Yeah, I mean, all you're doing is copying and pasting and Keyboard Maestro is doing the work in the background. I've got an example that I'm going to share later on that's similar in nature that it uses the data in the clipboard to fix something. And it is a flex, right? Because it's not even like a separate part of your workflow anymore, right? You've built this automation, it runs when you need it, and you don't have to think like, oh gosh, I might have a misspelled Mac Sparky on my clipboard at this moment, right? It's a background process for the computer, not a background process for you, if that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. So whether you're starting something new or you're scaling a business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim a domain name, showcase your offerings with a professional website, and grow your brand all in one place. I've been using Squarespace basically forever. I mean, way back, way back in the day, building sites in Squarespace, building them for work, building them for side projects, building them for other people. And if you are starting fresh or you have a website that needs to be redone, I can't recommend it enough. Someone close to me recently is, they're in the process of starting their own business, and they came to me and said, hey, you know, what do I need to do? 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Some stuff that you can do that I don't think a lot of people are aware of when they get started. What's first on your list? For me, it is the use of tokens or variables. I think they're mostly interchangeable. But tokens allow you to have information that you can share with other people. And you have information inserted into your action or your workflow automatically. So some of these are simple, right? Like I need the date or time inserted here. And you have a bunch of different ways, short time, long time, different variations of date and time, depending on how you want to see them. But it's also more creative than that. So one that I didn't even know it did until putting this outline together was, you can use the info for the current track playing in music as a token. So say that you're somebody who wants to have a running list of music you listen to. Or when you play a certain song, right, you want something else to happen on your system. It can detect and know what's happening in this other app. The beauty of a token is you're not hard coding these things, right? You're telling Keyboard Maestro, I need this piece of information based on the current state of whatever that is in currently. One that I think a lot of people get a lot of good use of is the name or URL of the active tab in Safari or Chrome, right? You could go and copy and paste that. But if you have a workflow you're using often, like say that you are putting a post together, an outline together, something that you and I do all the time, having just a trigger away. Okay, pull this information of what I'm looking at in the browser and do something with it. Again, based on what I'm doing in that moment. So I would definitely explore tokens. There's a whole range of them. I've just touched on a couple, and they can be extremely useful. Yeah, I agree. And that's kind of an example of Peter just going nuts and putting every possible thing. It's like, that's one of the reasons why people often elevate from shortcuts to Keyboard Maestro, because there's no way Apple would give you some of the tools you can use in their variable system. One of the ones that really stands out for me is what I think of as application specific shortcuts. So in Keyboard Maestro, you can collect your macros into folders. And for each folder, you can have special instructions. And the unlock for me was here when I realized I could say, like every shortcut in this folder will only work if the active application is Apple Mail, or Notes, or Obsidian, or OmniFocus, or name your favorite app here. And what that allows you to do is build a tool set out on an app-specific basis. Good example, I've been talking about Mail, because Mail's a great example. I have so many here. That little reply thing I did with the Memoji, I have like 10 of those, and they're all in this folder, so they only trigger in Mail. Another one is I made an Apple Script that copies a link to the current Mail message. Years ago, I did that in Text Expander, but I've switched it over to Keyboard Maestro. And I just hit Control-K, and it only works in Mail. So I don't have conflicts using Control-K and other apps to do other things. And it allows you to use very common shortcut triggers on a per-app basis that doesn't mess up your whole system. Another one in Mail, what is it, Command-Shift-D to send an email? It's like, first of all, just let me go down a little rabbit hole here. How is that the shortcut to send an email? I think it's Dispatch, maybe, like from the, I don't know. I'm sure there's a reason. There's a reason, and it probably dates back to Next. But yeah, that's one of the things that I've internalized it. Even in Mimestream, Mimestream has the option to use Mail shortcuts. And it's like, Command-Shift-D doesn't even register to me anymore. So it's like what three of my fingers do when it's time to send an email message. I'm sure it's like on an old war games computer, like you had to do something like that, right? But come on, Apple. Anyway, so what I did is I made a shortcut trigger. This is like the easiest Keyboard Maestro script I'm probably going to talk about all day. When I hit the keyboard combination Command-Return in Apple Mail, this is where I'm using app-specific shortcuts. It's only in the folder of the mail app. So it's not going to trigger anywhere else. But whenever I hit, if I'm in Mail as my active app, I hit Command-Return. It presses Command-Shift-D, which is, you know, Command-Return is the way you send a mail in every other email application. So I've just kind of rewired Apple Mail. But I'm using app-specific shortcuts. And I have like probably 20 different apps that I have app-specific shortcuts for. Dev and Think, Day One, Craft, Drafts, Fantastical, Grammarly. Just looking at my listing right now, anytime I want to add a feature to an application via the Keyboard Maestro, I can. And I do that with app-specific shortcuts. So I make a folder. I say that in that folder, this shortcut only runs in this app. So then I can go nuts with very simple key combinations or even conflict palettes, which I'll talk about later. And everything works. And it doesn't mess up other apps. I think that's a good example, too, of a way that Keyboard Maestro is set apart a bit from what the system can do. Buried in system settings under Keyboard, you can change shortcuts to things that are in the menus in an application. But Keyboard Maestro can expose things that aren't necessarily in the menus. Or maybe you need something in a menu, but with a token or a variable attached to it, right? And so sure, changing a keyboard shortcut is relatively simple in macOS. And you can do it per app. But again, you're going to hit a ceiling with that. You're going to hit a point where this does part of what I want to do, but not all of what I want to do. And so just because Keyboard Maestro, like on the surface, may replicate something the system can do or shortcuts can do, it's when you want to go further that you run into the need for an app like this. Another one I mentioned just a second ago I want to talk about is conflict palettes. Because when I first realized the existence of these things, I thought it was like an unlock moment. It's like, wait, it works that way? So most apps, when you have shortcuts for a trigger, often keyboard shortcuts are the best triggers, because your hand's already on the keys. And we're not going to get into a full list in this episode. But like I said, you can have a MIDI key be a trigger with Keyboard Maestro. There's so many ways you can trigger things. But I think there's almost no better way than your keyboard, because your fingers are on the keyboard. But what happens is sometimes you have more than one thing triggered by the same keyboard shortcut. And rather than having that break the app, which happens kind of across the Mac if you have multiple things triggered by the same keyboard shortcut, if it's in Keyboard Maestro, it creates what they call a conflict palette. And it's just a little thing that pops up on the screen that says, oh, OK, you just hit Command-R. And there are three things that you can do with Command-R. Which one do you want? And it highlights the active letter. So if the next one starts with the letter E, so you type RE, it picks that one. If it's RA, it picks that one. So with a conflict palette, you can have a list that filters from 30 items, because they all have the same keyboard shortcut, down to one very quickly. And as an example, back to my Memoji example, the way I trigger that is they are all triggered with Control-R, or Reply with a Memoji, in Apple Mail. So I'm combining my last trick with this one. So they are all in a app-specific folder for Apple Mail. And they're all triggered with the same shortcut, Control-R. So if I want to send you back a heart Memoji, I hit Control-R. And it shows me all of the Memoji responses. And I type H, which goes to the one with me with little hearts. And then it selects that, and I hit Return. And then it does the whole thing. It hits Command-R to reply. It inserts the heart Emoji from the custom clipboard. It hits Send. And also, by the way, it also archives the message, because I do that too. So it just takes care of the whole process for me by hitting Control-R plus H. That's awesome. You have to experience this to really appreciate it. But when I made the Keyboard Meister feel good, I think the conflict palettes are the thing that gets people most excited. Because it's a huge unlock once you figure it out. Oh, yeah. How many times in other automation systems do you end up in a situation where things don't work the way you expect? Or they end up fighting each other? I used to run into this sometimes with TextExpander. And they had a feature of, oh, if you have used the same trigger phrase to do an expansion, it would give you a warning. Because otherwise, I would type semicolon DS for David Sparks. But maybe I also had accidentally done a semicolon DSE for something else. And at that point, the system would give me a warning, because it wanted to make me aware that I had created a collision course in my automation. The Keyboard Meister goes a step further than that. But there are other palettes that you can also use. I agree with you. The Conflict palette is incredible. And I think when you are looking at Keyboard Meister versus some other apps, that is a standout feature. But you also have something called the Global Macro palette. So any macro with a trigger for the Global Macro palette, you get a little floating palette wherever you are. And those triggers, those actions, are put in that palette. The way I think about this is, starting with Mojave, you could do quick actions in Finder. So if I right-click on an MP3, I get certain actions. Or if I right-click on a JPEG, I get other certain actions. It's like that, but expanded. And so this will appear and disappear depending on what macros are active. And so you could even, over time, change these things out. And because it's a simple trigger in Keyboard Maestro, it's actually really easy to have these actions be triggered in different ways. One of my complaints with the quick action system in Finder is that telling Finder when I want certain things available to me is actually pretty clunky. I want this shortcut available, but just on these types of files when I right-click on them. Like, you can do that, but you're going to spend a lot of time fine-tuning it. And I think Keyboard Maestro's editor and how you select things that end up in this particular palette is much simpler. Yeah. And I really don't want to dump on shortcuts, because there's a lot that shortcuts is really good at. Of course. But I'm going to dump on shortcuts for a minute. Because shortcuts has the feature where you can attach a keyboard shortcut to a shortcut. And in my experience, that is just not consistent. Sometimes it doesn't work. And I don't know why, because there's no feedback. And that just never happens with Keyboard Maestro. They always work. Another cool power trick with Keyboard Maestro that isn't unlocked for people is UI scripting, or user interface scripting. Imagine that you've got some custom website that you deal with every day for work. And you have to click a button on this one page. And you just want to automate that, but there's no way to do it. You can't write an Apple script to say, click this button. There's just no way around it. Keyboard Maestro has this feature called click at found image. So what you do is you take a picture of the button, and then you copy that into the Keyboard Maestro action and say, click at the center of this image at this moment. So then you write a script that says, go to this specific URL, the work thing, wait three seconds so you know it loads, click at found image. And now you've just automated the process of pushing that button every day. And then you combine that with whatever other automation you need to do. That is huge for people. Oh, yeah, because there are so many things that we interact with. The web, Electron apps, which sometimes very often don't lend themselves to automation very easily on the Mac. This is a way around all of that. If there's UI presented to me as a user, Keyboard Maestro can interact with it. And I remember in the early days, it was, and you can still do this. I actually want my cursor at this place on the screen and relative to the front windows top corner or something. And that's still all in there. But the found image thing even takes that away where I just, hey, this is what this button looks like. It makes it much more approachable and I think much more, sort of much more safe to use because you're not trying to determine where something is in a window relative to something else. Like, do you see this group of pixels that looks like this? Click them. It's so good. It really is useful. And in a world where a lot of Mac apps aren't native, we're dealing with a lot of Electron apps now or PWAs and things like that. This type of trigger really opens those up to automation in a way that they just aren't open otherwise. An example of the use of this trigger was in the last year, because I made the Apple productivity suite feel good. I moved a bunch of data from OmniFocus to Reminders or from Reminders back to OmniFocus. I don't remember which direction I was going, but I was using shortcuts because shortcuts is actually very good for that. It can see the fields of Reminders and it can see the fields of an OmniFocus task and it can map them across. And there was a checkbox in shortcuts that said, basically accept this for all entries. And I had like 80 entries that were gonna get moved over. But there was something wrong with shortcuts where it just wasn't acknowledging that I'd click the box to do it for all of them. So for each one, it would want me to click a specific box on the screen to say, okay, do you want me to do it for this one? Yes, okay. Now how about this one? And it was like 80 of them. And then I had like another five lists I wanted to send over. And I knew I would be sitting there all day clicking that box, which is gonna make me nuts. So I just wrote a script with a time delay, like of a few seconds. And I took a screenshot of that window and said, click this box and just triggered the script and walked away from the computer. And it did all that for me. That's awesome. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I used it to fix a problem in shortcuts. There's some irony there. Yeah, there is, there is. But anytime you've got that repeated click this box thing, this is really good for it. Another one I know that you use is the Stream Deck integration. Yeah, I use it all the time. So there is a plugin for the Stream Deck called KMLink that makes this easy. You can also use the buttons on the Stream Deck as triggers in Keyboard Maestro. I set it on KMLink because I think it's a little bit simpler. Oh yeah, I think it's the best way. Because you can move them around then. Exactly. And so this is a plugin for the Stream Deck. When you open the Stream Deck software, you say, okay, I want this button to be a KMLink button. And then you just get a dropdown of different Keyboard Maestro actions that you can perform. And I got a bunch of these set up. So the two that I use the most are sitting down to prepare for Mac Power users or Connected. And I can hit a button on my Stream Deck and Keyboard Maestro will open a new Safari window with the tabs in it for the entry in the CMS, the entry in our ad inventory management system. Connected has a couple of other things. Like we rotate who reads the title every week. That's on a website. It loads that up. And it will open Notion. And it, again, I can do all that myself, right? But just hitting a single button and having a bunch of stuff happen at once is really fantastic. And I agree with you, KMLink is the way to do this. And it makes it, I mean, it turns something like physical into a trigger, right? And it, for me at least, it makes the Stream Deck even more valuable that I'm not tied down to just what Elgato offers, right? Or just running a shortcut from the Stream Deck, which you can also do. But yeah, KMLink is a lifesaver. Yeah, like I do the same thing for like when I read ads, I have a button I push that opens up the webpage with the ad reads and the recording software. Or if I'm gonna record a show, it opens up the windows that we use for the show. Plus, because you can run an Apple Script in Keyboard Maestro, and because Moom has Apple Script support, I can have it actually set the windows exactly as I want. Nice. Although Keyboard Maestro has built-in features to also say, put this window on the left, put it on the right, or whatever. I actually like the Moom setup better. It's more granular and I'm very picky about things. But all of that is done with KMLink buttons. In fact, looking at my Stream Deck, the majority of it is KMLink because it's kind of the get-out-of-jail-free card on your Stream Deck. Anything that you can't figure out with the built-in Stream Deck software, you can write a Keyboard Maestro script and it's gonna fix it. That thing earlier about the fixed spellings of Max Markey, I could just put that on a button and anytime I've got anything in the clipboard I want fixed, I push a button and it happens. Very useful. A couple of power tips on using KMLink. If you've got a lot of macros like I do, it can get kind of slow scrolling through them because it goes and gets a full list and it updates as you update Keyboard Maestro. It's a live interaction. But if you duplicate a Stream Deck... Oh, that's cool. I don't think I had to realize that yes, that's clever because I have far fewer than you do but even what I've got sometimes like you hit that it's like I'm thinking I'm thinking it's like yeah, I have an m4 max here. What are you doing? If you've got like a thousand macros, it thinks even longer Yeah This episode of the Mac power users is brought to you by Devon think go to Devon Technologies comm slash MPU to get organized and unleash your creativity get 10% off with that link It's the end of the year gang I'm always thinking about my tech stack for the next year and you know one tool that never falls off that list for me is Devon think that decisions even easier this year with the release of Devon thing to go 4.0 Kepler, which is here released just this Tuesday It brings Mac level power to iOS closing the feature gap named after astronomer Johannes Kepler It has AI integration throughout and a built-in chat system global chat plus per document conversations Which remembers up to 100 chats the AI can summarize documents extract text from images generate images Auto-tag and rename files the AI based search assistant allows for writing queries in plain English instead of complex search Syntax, of course Devon think is right on top of this AI revolution We're going through and making Devon think better The versioning has a ton of great features including automatically keeping multiple versions of documents While revision proof databases can do a lot of cool stuff and are perfect for legal work Regulations and audit trails. It also has a pub support and an updated UI for iOS 26 is liquid glass Best of all all Devon think Pro and Devon think server users get Devon thing to go now for free All you need to do is just keep your license current with updates Exclusively for Mac power users listeners you get 10% off now when you go to Devon technologies com MPU that's Devon technologies comm slash MPU go there right now get 10% off this really powerful tool that both Steven and I use all the time our thanks to Devon thing for their support of the show and all of relay One of my most common uses for Keyboard maestro is text expansion I use text expander forever, but at some point the last couple years decided to kind of rebuild all of that in Keyboard maestro and the beauty of it is that the the the actual actions are very simple, right? so if I go in here to my I have them as a group called text expansion and The trigger is a string typed so for instance if I want to Type you have a paragraph of lorem ipsum, right? Just that that that Latin we use as placeholders and a bunch of stuff Yeah, I can type and all mine start with semicolon I did that started like 20 years ago and just have never broken the habit. So semicolon LOR and What keyboard maestro will do? once it detects that string it will Simulate three deletes. So my semicolon LOR isn't there and then it will insert text From keyboard maestro wherever I am and you can optionally One of the great things about keyboard maestro is you can have Like a reinforcement action so you can have it play a sound or show something when when something is complete so I have it play a sound and That you know that way I know that it worked that was something I really liked about text expander and I wanted to to continue to have that even though I was moving on to keyboard maestro and It gets powerful when you can add Tokens to this. So another one that I use all the time is I need the markdown formatting for an image like to put in our like in the CMS or on 512 pixels and If I have the URL for the image on the clipboard I can type a minus semicolon MDI for markdown image and It has the the inserted text. I Have a token for the system clipboard where the image should be and then I have it move the cursor where I can type what will be the like the the title of the image and it's just a couple of Keyboard strokes for me, but it automates all of this It puts the cursor where I want it and then I can type in and move forward So you have made this transition. I'm still using text expander and I'm super curious. So where First of all, where does this fall down for you versus text expander? Like one of the features in text expander I love is that the way you can code your Expansions like anything related to field guide is FG period and then the entry it makes it easier for me to remember them Like if I want the link to the field guide page, it's FG Link if I get a testimonial, it's FG test. Can you do that kind of? coding with text expander, I think you could if You're using a string as your trigger. You have some Some options there so you can say the case must match or following a character or a word break, but that string can be anything and so I believe you could The grouping would be manual like you would have to do FG dot in front of any related ones But I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work All right other question how long did the transition take you because I have a lot of snippets Yeah, I mean it took me I broke it up over the course of several days and just like okay I'm gonna move all my relay related ones over all my five total pixels ones over where you run into issues is expansions that use tokens the language for those tokens is different between the two applications and so Forward or whatever right clipboard the time format some of them are the same but not all of them And so those some of those I just had a straight-up rebuild, right? So it took a little while but I didn't want to Keep paying the subscription for text expander and I'm already using keyboard maestro for other things And so yeah, it was some work, but it was also an opportunity for me I have far fewer text expansions now than I did right? I just had stuff that was Building up over time in there that I wasn't really using. Yeah now one thing I lost and I could recreate this But it's not nearly as automatic as text expander has a thing where you can have a shared group of expansions. So We used to have one that had a bunch of sponsor names in it So if you misspelled a sponsor name, it would fix it for you or you know You miss capitalized it or something. It would fix it for you I don't have that anymore, right because I'm the only one only one using this now You can export macros and have someone else import them, but it's not a true sync the way text expander groups had So, I don't know if that's important to you But if it's important to a listener that is something that you'll need to to figure out if you were to make this move Are there any other things that you feel like you've lost since making the move? Really I I don't think so. I think once I again kind of rebuilt the ones with tokens I didn't have I didn't have anything in text expander that I couldn't replicate in keyboard maestro and and part of that is because keyboard maestro can do things like run a shell script or Reach out to Apple script. I was doing some of that stuff in Text expander keyboard maestro can do all of that as well So really I don't think I had to leave anything behind other than those shared groups Yeah and I could see I have to think this through but I could also see some ways you can make it better than text expander like When I was talking about earlier like fixing text on the clipboard and stuff you could integrate that into text expansion I just have to think through where I would want to do that. But yeah That might be kind of interesting too, well, I'm gonna have to think about that but I I'm so deep in text expander It's hard, you know, and the other thing is I do like text expander I can access those expansions on mobile too and you couldn't do that with this But right you can sync keyboard maestro between multiple Macs but it is Mac OS only and so if These things like really important to you how you work on the iPad for instance These aren't gonna be helpful to you there That was not an issue for me But if it is for someone out there, then that's something you've got to contend with. All right. Well, that's food for thought I'm glad it's working for you because this was like over a year ago that you did this, right? So but at this point if it yelled you would have known. Yeah. Yeah, I bet I've been super Super happy with it. In fact one of my Favorite workflows is a Text expansion workflow. So I have this this recurring need in my life to copy an amount of money like out of a An email or a bank website and put it in a spreadsheet, right? I just spent a lot of time doing these things and a lot of spreadsheet apps including Google Sheets, which is most of what I use if You have a comma or a dollar sign and You try to use that in a formula It freaks out. It won't it very often just won't do what you want it to do. And so I have In keyboard maestro a text expansion Trigger I use I call this clean money, which I thought was just kind of funny Semicolon CM and what it does is if there it takes whatever's on the system clipboard and it runs it through a shell script that basically takes anything that's not a Digit out of the string and then puts the new string back on the clipboard so you were talking earlier about Having keyboard maestro act on something that's on your clipboard This is the same thing. I'm just triggering it with a typed string and so the workflow for this so I have a tab with the bank open and Say that I need to copy minus, you know $1,200 so that's on my clipboard. I go to Google Sheets. I Type semicolon CM and what I get there is 1200 so all the other data has been stripped out of it and I use this I don't even hundreds of times a week probably and I have the shell script in the show notes. You can go look at it There's lots of ways to do this. I just happen to do it via the shell script It's honestly probably not even the most efficient way to do it. But these things can be really powerful, right? So one that I use all the time. I need it to be bulletproof I was doing this in text expander and I was able to move this right over to keyboard maestro Without any real change and because it's a shell script I can Alter what it does and how it works really really easily All right. I think that's pretty cool Let's talk about I let's just kind of go back and forth on some of our favorite keyboard maestro workflows I think they call it macros in the app. I'm always confused about what I'm supposed to call them. I have you know, I've talked before about the concept of contextual computing and for me the idea is When you're at your computer You should be able to go from the thought of I want to do this thing To doing this thing with the fewest intermediary steps like a good example is like answering an email You shouldn't have to go to your mail app and look through the inbox and search for the mail You should have a way to click a button and go straight to that email to answer it And that's why I like linking emails But there's a whole bunch of stuff. I do like this and on On my Mac. I've made a whole bunch of macros and keyboard maestro. I'm looking right now it looks like about 30 that do specific things like if I want to go read an ad for Mac power users or if I want to Go to the broadcast page of my newsletter or you know Like just all sorts of little things that I do all the time and it's not just going to websites Like when I screencast, you know how in the latest version of Mac OS if you look in the top right corner Has a clock there in the date, which is great looks cool, right? But when you're screencasting Having an actual clock there isn't ideal because sometimes when you screencast you hit a speed bump and There's like a 20 minute jump in time and it looks weird to watch the clock just jump 20 minutes But there's no way to get rid of it But there is a way with a little terminal command you can switch it to an analog clock, you know So I can toggle the clock between analog and digital I can you know it's just like a whole bunch of weird stuff that I just do constantly and So I put all of that I've created scripts for all the things that I do constantly and I give them all the same Trigger in keyboard maestro. It's control option command M for Mac sparky and If you've been listening to show, you know what that I just did I created a conflict palette and that one is not app specific. It's global throughout the whole system But as I go through the day every time I want to switch gears to do something else I just hit, you know control option command M and Then click the appropriate trigger in the conflict palette and off I go contextual computing I've also done that with the the s key So control option command s gives me setups like set it up to process email So I've got email on the left and omni focus on the right and the web or calendar or whatever, you know I've got a setup to process my calendar and like all the things I do regularly I've got a separate setup for each one and it's all triggered by the same conflict palette And then the third one is personal so if I hit control option command P then it's like get me straight to my banking page or to a new day one entry or my Disneyland reservation page, you know, just My wood shop note in Apple notes, you know I can get to the stuff that I want to do very frequently in the context of personal on my computer and Those are such basic ideas, right? Just give them all the same trigger so you can bring them up whenever you need to do them But I use those things I don't know how many times a day I I start something with one of those conflict palettes a simple one that that I use very often is I Sort of call them app sets. So again, there's a bunch of different ways to do this Including at the system over I like open these apps at login But very often I will I kind of move between sets of apps in my day, right? So cross forward stuff is like all in Chrome right if I'm doing show notes, I mentioned mine one earlier that opens a set of URLs and opens notion I've got a couple of of app set macros where I can These are also on my stream deck I can hit a button and if the apps that I want at that given time aren't open it opens them In mass and I have just like what like a basic one. It's like, okay. I always want mime stream Reminders Timery and messages open right and it's it's just a little thing But it makes it really nice to just very quickly launch a set of apps that that I need another one that I get a lot of use out of kind of going back to the text expansion thing for a second is the ability to have a A Drop-down show up and I can choose text from the drop-down again This is something that was in text expander, but I use in a keyboard maestro very often My example is very often I need a list of relay host names with their associated company name and I just can never remember them right like some of them are easy. Some of them are hard to remember and so I built you get the the action is called prompt with list and I have a text list But you can also have a list with a system clipboard with variables in it with calculations in it files in it I can use my arrow keys to select what I want I hit enter and that goes on on the clipboard and gets typed wherever my wherever I am Instead of having a bunch of different expansions For something like this. It can all be in one one that I'm working on right now is Because currently I'm sort of monitoring the support email for David's apps and you know very often we have Similar questions over and over we try to address those and help documentation or FAQs. People don't read and listen to an email anyways and Having one of these lists for Each of the major apps with common things. I'm going to reply to people and then I could just very quickly Fire off a paragraph of text and send it to somebody is a real lifesaver. Yeah one that I have this is a real basic one, but have you ever gone on like a banking site or something and Need to type in an account number and you paste it and you're like, oh no, we will not accept that paste You have to type it. Well, one of the keyboard maestro actions is type text, you know type so you just take the clipboard contents and type it and So I created a shortcut that does that so whenever I get hit with that on the web I run the script that types the contents of the clipboard as opposed to pasting it Silly, but I find uses for it Yeah, man, that's so annoying when websites disable paste just yeah, it happens though. Yeah, this is my hack You have one called notion launcher. What is what does this do? Yeah, so much of these come down to conflict palettes Like, you know, I always think of 2025 as a year that I found peace with notion, right? Because I'm not a huge fan of web apps But we're heavily invested in it with the Mac power users and even some of the Mac sparky stuff but the one thing you can do if you install a local notion app, you can get a specific web link you are or a URL that gets you to the specific page you want and So I made a conflict palette that just launches those URLs and I've got you know for the Mac power user show planning and the Mac sparky lab report and You know focused show planning and like all the different ones that I use all the time they all use the same shortcut control in and that way I don't have to monkey around with like setting up sidebars and Trying to mouse to the right place all the ones that I use frequently are all under the same Keyboard shortcut triggers a conflict pilot plus a keystroke or two and off you go and it launches you into notion it doesn't do anything more than that, but I use it all the time and it has made my My relationship with notion healthier. Let's just say that yeah, and sometimes things can really be that simple, right? You can definitely build complicated things in this app, but For me some of my favorite automations are just the simple ones, right? That's things that I interact with every day Yeah, another conflict palette that I use all the time is My oddball characters, you know like the command symbol the option symbol arrow down like you can get to those on the Mac if you You know, there's keyboard shortcuts and you've got to go through a menu and find them and so what I did is I made a bunch of keyboard maestros that insert the specific symbol that I use all the time or Frequently like the delete key Like if you if you're a Mac Sparky You have to sometimes just put the symbol for the delete key into something you're you're working on So I I am hook them all to the same trigger, which is ctrl-o for oddball and Now anytime I'm anywhere I need to type an oddball character I hit ctrl-o I get the list of the ones I want pain, right? Exactly. And once you put this in place, you're good to go. In addition to these, I've been sharing like, I think kind of easy ones throughout. I also have some really complex ones that run Apple scripts and terminal commands and lots of stuff like that too. It's kind of hard to talk about that in a podcast about how you put all that together, but you can perform pretty complex actions on things on your Mac. This thing goes much deeper if you want it to. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password, the app that David and I both trust to create strong, unique passwords where we don't have to remember them. Because 1Password unlocks with a single password or interaction with Touch ID or Face ID. You have access to your passwords and other secure information across any platform you can think of. One of my favorite things about 1Password is they are always improving. Just recently, they were revisiting the 1Password browser extension. You've probably seen this if you use 1Password, you can get a little window that comes up in the upper right hand corner of your browser window, offering to save a new login credential or use a passkey to sign in. And over the years, that's gotten more complicated and 1Password has more features like Watch Tower, which can detect data breaches. And what they've done is they've gone and revisited that part of the user interface where it can now show multiple end page notifications. When you're ready to interact with them, you can do so. There's a new view all button there. Or you can press down on your keyboard, the down arrow to expand the stack. This is awesome because you can now keep track of all notifications that 1Password has for a certain login or page. And they're ordered by priority. So you know if something is important, it'll be there, ready to go. This is awesome. I use it all the time. I use Safari and Chrome on my Mac, 1Password works beautifully across both. It also works with those new fangled AI browsers and it's everywhere. It's so good. You can use 1Password for teams at work, 1Password for families at home, use it as an individual, share credentials with those in your life. Go to 1Password.com slash MPU to learn more and sign up for a free 30 day trial. And when you do, you'll get 20% off. That's 1Password.com slash MPU for 20% off. My thanks to 1Password for their support of Mac power users and all of Relay. Okay, so let's talk a bit about limitations. You know, we've been singing the praises of Keyboard Maestro, where does it hit a wall for you? Yeah, I think one for me is knowing where to put automation. This was the most common listener question, right? Because I have Alfred and I have shortcuts and I have Keyboard Maestro and those features, right? They overlap. There's a Venn diagram there somewhere. And the way I sort of handled it, I just kind of made a decision at some point that clipboard history is going to be in Alfred. Any other automation I want to do on the Mac, if at all possible, I'm going to do it in Keyboard Maestro. And that has ramifications, right? We mentioned earlier that this is a Mac only app. If I need an automation available on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, then I'm shoehorned into shortcuts. But the reality is a lot of these tools do have a lot of overlap and I just sort of made the decision. But I would love to hear from you because this was the most common question. And I think a lot of people struggle with this, is like, where do I put what? And I'm putting this in the limitations part of Keyboard Maestro because I think it's a limitation people feel, it's not a limitation of the app, but how do you approach that? I think you need to first assess what platforms you use. If you want to get work done on an iPad and you want to automate, this application does not help you. It doesn't work on iPad. And if that's you, and that's me, I do like to work on iPad, if I can automate something reliably with shortcuts that I may want to also run on my iPad, I will look at shortcuts and look for a way to do it. And often shortcuts is good enough to do some of those types of automations. However, there is a ceiling. And the things I was just talking about, like my contextually aware systems, that is only something that could be done with Keyboard Maestro. And my more advanced ones that are running all sorts of code, again, is a Keyboard Maestro only thing. So if it's a simple automation that I can reliably work in shortcuts, I actually will then bend to shortcuts because then I know I can actually run it on my phone and my iPad. There are also some things that shortcuts can do better than Keyboard Maestro. Like I'm having a lot of fun lately experimenting with a private cloud compute as a private AI that can fix text for me and whatnot. And you've got to trigger that through a shortcut. That's the only way in the door. So you need to kind of be aware of what you're doing, what platforms you're using. So there really isn't a one size fits all answer to that. That said, Keyboard Maestro absolutely affects my decisions about what platforms to use. Because Mac OS is pretty good, and because the laptops are really good now, like a MacBook Air can weigh less than an iPad, and it has Keyboard Maestro on it, that's a huge reason for me to not want to use the iPad. So you've just got to kind of choose your own path there. But I think you should have a good knowledge of what both can do. And then it's going to be obvious to you. But if you're like a guy or a gal who just like, look, I love my Mac. That's where I do my hard work. On my phone, I take calls and watch YouTube. I don't care about automation on mobile. I would go 100% Keyboard Maestro. I wouldn't even bother with shortcuts at that point, except for, like you said, those points where shortcuts can only do the thing that you want it to do. But I would be even more aggressive. I mean, I have a lot of macros in Keyboard Maestro. I've built them over the years. I've been teaching it in the labs and the field guide. So I'm very invested in it. It's my favorite of the two, because it's more reliable. So if I'm doing something and I really don't think I'm ever going to need to do it on an iPad, or I don't have a clear reason to do it on shortcuts, my preference is Keyboard Maestro, because I feel like I'm going to get that. That time is going to be well spent. When I then press the trigger to trigger the macro, it's just going to work. Whereas with shortcuts, sometimes it feels like, in a month, it may just stop working and I don't even know why. Yeah. I think another possible limitation, although you can work around it with things like UI scripting and looking for visual buttons and stuff, is that we use a lot of things on the Mac now that aren't native. A lot of us do a lot of work on the web or a lot of work in Electron apps. And I think while the UI scripting is a nice escape hatch for Keyboard Maestro to deal with those types of apps, if the trend continues, this Electron sort of infestation on the Mac, that does make some of this stuff a bit more complicated. That's certainly not unique to Keyboard Maestro, but I think all of these apps have to contend with this in the state that it is now and in the future. Well, and I would counter that a bit to say that it depends on the Electron app. Like, Obsidian does a good job of incorporating keyboard shortcuts. It allows you to interact with text on the screen. And I have an app-specific folder of Obsidian macros I've created with Keyboard Maestro that are very effective and work fine, even though it's an Electron app. In some ways, I think it's better because it's easier to map keyboard shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro than it is the native Mac OS for Electron apps. So it can actually be a help in dealing with Electron apps, but it really depends on the developer. Yeah, I mean, I'm using Notion and Slack and Discord all day. They may not be the best examples. No, Notion is really kind of unfriendly to automation, except for the automation they do inside Notion. Like, they have their own AI that's very effective, and they have some automation triggers that are really good. But when it comes to automating Notion, you've got to work kind of in their sandbox. It doesn't really help to be honest. But that said, I already shared, like, I have a Notion launcher that gets me to exactly the page I want. And it's not using Notion technology, it's using Keyboard Maestro. Notion even fights with something like PopClip. It's like, come on, guys. The thing that is frustrating for me, I wish they would fix, is the URL linking out of Notion is not good. It only goes to websites. You know, like, if I put an OmniFocus link in or an app-specific link in, which most apps on the Mac do willingly, it just doesn't get it. And I hope someday they add that. Yeah. I mean, you know, Notion has been really good for us in a lot of ways. I was thinking about it, it's like the ultimate status board. It's very easy to set tables up. You and I can both see it, the sponsor people can see it. Everybody is always well-informed because of it. I just don't care for it to do, like, the day-to-day work. And I know some people do, but it's just that for me is, I want something more native for that stuff. Anyway, yeah, I think it's the limitation, obviously, is the platform limitation. And you've just got to decide that. I think another limitation is it's a little bit steeper learning curve. It's not as pretty as shortcuts, and, you know, shortcuts makes it really clear how to make basic ones, and they've done a good job with the shortcuts gallery. And the keyboard maestro learning curve, however, I think is addressed if you, you know, get the field guide or go to the website and go to their forums and just, like, spend a little time. I think most of our listeners would be able to pick it up, no problem. Well, we do have some listener questions that I want to lob at you here. Jeremy wrote in saying, I've been using automation tools like Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts for a number of years, but naming my automations has been a constant struggle. I want to strike the right balance being as descriptive as possible without creating names that are just a short paragraph. How do you deal with naming conventions? The app-specific folders and shortcuts really helps you out here because you know that you're dealing with Apple Mail scripts because you're in that folder, it allows you to truncate it more. So, you know, I think if you can slice the onion, same thing, using folders and shortcuts can allow you to be a little more truncated with your names. And a related question that I've heard often is trigger conflicts. It's like, okay, well, I've got shortcuts I've made, Keyboard Maestro scripts I've made, you know, I've got all these different platforms I'm writing automations in, how do I avoid them crashing into each other because they all have the same shortcut? And what I would say in Keyboard Maestro, one of the best ways, so I'm actually answering a question Jeremy didn't ask, but I'm going to do it anyway. In Keyboard Maestro, they have a global view of all your macros. You can organize those by trigger. So if you hit the little down arrow on the right side there, it gives you a list of them. So all the A's are together, the B's are together. So you can always just take a look through your list to see if there's any conflicts and turn them off or change them. And what I always do before I create a new script with a new trigger is I just click the mouse outside of Keyboard Maestro on the desktop, and I just press the shortcut I'm contemplating using. Like, oh, you want to make an oddball character? You know, go on your desktop and hit Control-O first, just to make sure that you haven't wired that to shortcuts or something else, you know. So just make sure it's clean before you use it and then organize them. But naming your shortcuts and tracking your triggers is a real problem, and you just got to keep track of it. Yeah. In addition to having different folders or groups, which I definitely also do, one thing I do in Keyboard Maestro in particular, because it has a lot of flexibility here, each of your macros has an icon. And you can choose between some, like, internal macOS ones, application-specific icons, but they also have SF symbols and emoji and things like currencies and arrows in here. And for a lot of those, you can set a background color. And so that is a way for me to, when I'm looking to adjust something or better organize something, I can use all of those as sort of inputs for my eyes, and, okay, these are all, like, the 512 ones, right? And I've spoken about this before, but I tend to use, when at all possible, the same color across apps. So, like, all the 512 stuff is orange. If it's in Keyboard Maestro or in Reminders, right, orange is the 512 color. And so spend some time with the icon chooser. You just double-click on the icon of any macro there in the editor, and you get a little palette where you can adjust those. And that can be a great way, too, to keep them separate, just visually, when you're going to go look for something later. Yeah. sf-symbols-and-names was a version 11 feature that they added with version 11. And I don't know about you, Stephen. I cannot bring myself to use emoji in file names or titles. There's just something in me that looks at it and just says, no. But sf-symbols, I'm OK with. They're not so cartoony, and I feel like those are OK names. So yeah, that's definitely a good trick there. And color coding, I do that as well. Yeah. Dustin wrote in, I tried Keyboard Maestro once but could see enough of the rabbit hole to know I should avoid it until I come across a use case. I cannot do any other way. Now I'm aware that's a pretty low threshold based on what I know about Keyboard Maestro, but Alfred really solves most of my needs. So I guess my question is, what's the tipping point of time investment to recoup time spent learning and setting up KM? If you're good with Alfred and you don't feel the automation itch scratching at you, frankly, if you, Dustin, at this point in the show, you've heard what me and Stephen are doing, a lot of the stuff is not stuff you could do with Alfred. If that sounds like something you'd like to add, then spend the time. Really, learning Keyboard Maestro is just getting knowledge of the triggers and actions. And once you have that, then you're going to know where it works. But if at this point in the show, you're like, eh, none of that stuff sounds like anything I really need, then just stick with Alfred, you're fine. You don't have to. Not everybody has to go down this rabbit hole. Yeah. Yeah, there are so many great apps on the Mac. I mean, we really have a richness of things, right? You could use LaunchBar for some things like this, TextExpander, Raycast, BetterTouchTool. There are so many, again, overlapping tools in this area. For me, part of it was just like a decision, like, okay, I'm going to have stuff in here and not have so many things scattered, but you certainly don't have to make that decision. Like for me, I could do Clipboard History in Keyboard Maestro, but I like the way Alfred does it, and that sort of works for me. And so that's where I leave that, and that's totally fine. All right, another question. This is from Catherine. Every app these days wants to have some sort of AI hook via APIs, MCP, or whatever. As far as I know, Keyboard Maestro doesn't have those hooks yet as part of Keyboard Maestro Actions. There are some third-party workarounds, but do you think this is a limitation? I'm spending a lot of time dipping my toes into MCP, Mobile Context Protocol, and AI integrations, but I've never really felt like I needed it in Keyboard Maestro because Keyboard Maestro isn't the app that does the work, it's the app that sets things up to do the work or gets you to the app that does the work. So I really look at the AI integrations more on the targets of Keyboard Maestro than Keyboard Maestro itself. And that said, an LLM, I wouldn't test it before the show, if you say, I'm using Keyboard Maestro and I want to build a macro to do this, this, and this, the LLM will actually give you advice on which actions and triggers to use. A couple of the ones I asked, it gave me good advice, a couple of them, it gave me bad information because it's an LLM and that happens, but at least kind of gets you in the ballpark. So you could use them to help build macros with a touch-and-go reliability, but actually working with AI in it, I don't really see much cause for it. As I'm talking through this, I was thinking, well, maybe it would be cool if I could run an LLM against my clipboard, like I was talking about earlier, as opposed to me kind of hand coding it. But that stuff really isn't there at this point, Catherine. Maybe that'll be the big thing with version 12, who knows, but it's not there currently and I don't feel I particularly miss it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's where I am with it as well. If you had like a shortcut, for instance, that was using Apple's foundation models or chat GPT or something, you can trigger shortcuts from within Keyboard Maestro. So if you wanted Keyboard Maestro to kind of be in charge of all of your triggers, you could have like the action part be handled by shortcuts, but I don't think it's holding Keyboard Maestro back. I could see it moving in that direction, though, as these tools become more useful, but right here at the end of 2025, I don't think it's a limitation really at all. Yeah. Oliver wrote in, is there any way to set up a trigger whenever the webcam is turned on? Sort of. So I spent some time on this and there is a trigger tied to USB devices in Keyboard Maestro and it can trigger something when a USB device is attached or unattached. So I used the Insta360 camera and I went into System Profiler or I think it's called System Information now, whatever it's called, System Information, and I went to the USB section and I found the camera and it was called Insta360 Link. Yeah. So I copied that name. I pasted it because Keyboard Maestro is looking for, one of the things it can look for is the name of the device. And so I said, okay, when this camera is attached, you know, I think I said like hide all applications just as a test. The limitation I ran into was that only works when the USB device is actually actively plugged in. So for me, my camera's always plugged in, just sometimes it's off in software, basically. And so it couldn't see it when the camera woke up. But if you are a person who like only plugs in your webcam when you need it, then my strategy would work. And so, but I would spend some time with the USB device trigger because it can do other things. I couldn't quite build exactly what this question asked, but I got pretty close. Yeah. I mean, it's the plugging in, it's not the turning on. That USB trigger is actually quite useful. I have it when I plug my scanner in, it does a whole bunch of stuff to get me ready to get in scan mode. So there's uses for that. Another thing I would look at, Stephen, is like, are there particular apps you use when you want to use the camera? And if there are, like maybe you always load Zoom every time you need to use the camera. Well, then there's your trigger. You just make the trigger that I've opened Zoom. And then that... Well, it's been a while. But you and I both use this app every day. It gets us out of so many jams. There are so many emails I get from listeners and Labs members asking for a way to do something. And so often, the answer is Keyword Maestro. We wanted to give it a little more love. And Gengo, check it out. It's an app made by one of the good guys of the app community here. And a lot of people have dipped their toe in this. And then six months later, they're swimming in it. They're all the way in. That could be you. Could be you. So yeah, go check it out. This is one of those apps, like you said, we like to touch base on every few years. And I'm always excited when there's an update to Keyword Maestro. I always want to go pour through the notes and see what's been added. I'm just always so impressed with his new features. Because he does an update every couple of years or so. But you look at the app, you're like, what more could he add? But it's not fluff. Every time he adds more, it's actually real substantive stuff. And it's like, like you said, a new box of candy every couple of years. All right, we are the Mac Power Users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash mpu. Go check it out. You can go there to check out the show notes, get the links to the things we talked about today. You can also sign up for more power users there, the ad for extended version of the show. Thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace, Devon, Think, and 1Password. Go check them out. All solid applications. And we'll see you next time.