@Bmosbacker Yes, yes, yes. I don’t do any coding (except for tinkering around occasionally with other people’s very simple scripts to see if I can figure out how they work). Keyboard Maestro is amazing and well worth the money – and in fact, it would be worth far more money if I had time to sit down for a week and figure out where I am failing to take advantage of it.
I’m sure the @MacSparky Field Guide will be great (and I’ve already purchased it) – but in addition, the forum for KM is incredibly helpful, to the point that I have a couple of complex KM Shortcuts that include scripts created by very helpful people who just volunteered to solve my problem for me.
If you have a task you’d like to automate, but you can’t figure out where to start, you can often post in the forum and have a suggested solution pretty quickly. (And sometimes, as in my case, built for you.)
With discussion boards like this one and the Automators one and the Keyboard Maestro one, there are so many resources that anyone can take advantage of it.
@davidrepmo is spot on. Indeed, I spent very little time on scripting in this field guide because I didn’t want people to think they had to script to make it work. You can do a lot without any scripting.
I also mentioned the KM forums (and the excellent KM Wiki) in the additional resources at the end. Some folks are doing crazy stuff with scripting in Keyboard Maestro.
I feel like I’m missing out…I bought the FG but I’ve no idea where the ‘thank you’ video is
I only regularly use KM for one thing at the moment, logging in to App Store Connect and drilling down to a specific graph, so I’m hoping this will kickstart broader use for me.
Once the purchase was made, on the screen that popped up confirming the payment/purchase, the little video was there. If you missed it, maybe it makes an appearance in the FG – otherwise, reach out to MacSparky – sure he will be able to make a plan by sharing a link or something!
@MacSparky thanks for the wonderful guide! I’m at “controlling the mouse” and noticed you didn’t use the Get button to get the coordinate of your mouse cursor. I was doing all kinds of things to get those before I noticed that little button;-) Try it! you can also verify that it works using the Go button. It will work with whatever option you have selected: absolute, main screen’s corner or what ever you have chosen. Way easier than having to make a macro to get the coordinate like I used to.
I have a quick question about the sample KM macro for form letters used in the video field guide. Regarding “Address 2” input, if I leave that section blank in the input form section (i.e., there is no second line of the address in my example) it seems to default the input to “Address 1” and types that information twice on separate lines. Is there a way around this?
I’ve worked through the whole Field Guide in the past 3 days and it’s been fantastic.
I’ve made a script so cool that when I showed my mum even she was impressed and it takes a lot to impress her tech wise.
I made a script that at 21:40 every evening it does the following automatically;
Performs a 30 sec countdown using the top right notification.
Then displays “Shutdown!” in large text in the centre of my screen and then hide all my apps.
Opens a maximised safari window and then goes to a specific Google Sheet link where I track my habits. It then goes to View > Zoom > 90%
Then opens Things 3 maximised window so that I can plan my tasks for the next day.
Then opens a Bear maximised window, goes to a specific note template I use for my daily review and duplicates it. It then goes to the duplicated note and edits the title to add today’s date using the date on my Mac.
All this automatic! I can’t believe how incredible I felt this being my first script and now I can’t help but think what I could do next.
I love this script because I wouldn’t do the above actions most of the time due to the friction in setting everything up every evening and then there’s remembering to do it i the first place! Now I have NO excuse!
Thanks David for the guide and introducing me to the program!
Do you mean you purchased Keyboard Maestro and they are doing all these things or are you writing AppleScript and integrating it with Keyboard Maestro?
@MacSparky just running through KMFG for the first time (nice job, by the way), I noticed in video 3.5 User Input at around 6:22 when Favourite Star Wars Movie didn’t appear in the “Insert Token” → “Variable” list, the macro needed to be run before that token existed. This is not the case any more. When you add a variable to the list in the Prompt action, it is available immediately in the “Insert Token” → “Variable” list (and is removed in kind). I’m using Keyboard Maestro Version 9.0.5.
In 5.2 Debugging, you state that you’ve attached a macro for Debugger Toggle but the video lesson had no attachments. I worked it out and also noticed that you have a ‘Cancel All Macros’ macro too, so I quickly implemented that one too. This video is great, and counts for one of the major ‘A-ha’ moments I’ve had while watching the course.
Enjoying the videos, and I love getting back in the swing of inventing shortcuts (I used to use QuicKeys but never made the transition to KM, which just felt unintuitive).
