Keyboard Maestro is my favorite applications ever. It's the one-stop-shop for an astounding array of powerful features. It can be used to replace ton of other third-party utilities. Some examples of what it can do:<p>1. You can easily implement your own window manager in it, e.g., replaces Moom or Magnet.<p>2. You can bind any AppleScript, shell script, etc... to a keyboard shortcut.<p>3. You can record and replay GUI macros, e.g., like Vim and Emacs macros but for any application.<p>4. At has a ton of built-in actions to script practically anything about your system, e.g., sleep, simulating media keys, image manipulation, etc... I suspect a lot of uses of Karabiner can be replaced by Keyboard Maestro.<p>5. It has a built-in clipboard history, with powerful features, like, processing an item from the clipboard with a Keyboard Maestro macro. One I use sometimes is running OCR on a screenshot I have on the clipboard.<p>6. You can bind any menu item in any application to a keystroke. E.g., you can rebind menu items to other keys, or adding key bindings to menu items that don't have keyboard shortcuts.<p>7. You can create custom command palettes (i.e., like ⇧⌘P in VS Code) for applications. For example, the command palette in Photoshop is awful, so I just made one for my common actions in Keyboard Maestro instead.<p>All of the above can sync seamlessly between computers with any file sync service (e.g., Dropbox). It's probably the best sync I've ever used, in 5+ years of use I've never had even the slightest hiccup. I don't bother using macOS built-in settings for things Keyboard Maestro supports for this reason. Put it in Keyboard Maestro and it will automatically sync to any Mac I use (I always install Keyboard Maestro).
Keyboard Maestro is excellent. Makes automation on macOS way more fun, IMO.<p>One nifty feature I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it can click on the screen based on OCR. So, if there's some UI element you want to interact with and you're not sure how to do it programmatically you can take a small screenshot of it and KM will use that to find the element on screen. Comes with useful visual debugging too.<p>Also, I find it pairs well with a launcher application like Alfred or Raycast:<p>- For Alfred: <a href="https://github.com/iansinnott/alfred-maestro">https://github.com/iansinnott/alfred-maestro</a>
- For Raycast: <a href="https://www.raycast.com/eluce2/list-keyboard-maestro-macros">https://www.raycast.com/eluce2/list-keyboard-maestro-macros</a>
Keyboard Maestro is fantastic, and it's even better when combined with an Elgato StreamDeck. There's great integration for "run this KM macro" directly from a button (without eating up a keyboard shortcut), so I have 32 handy buttons on my StreamDeck XL for things like<p><pre><code> * open Obsidian and switch to my daily journal page"
* type my password" (which reads securely from Keychain)
* find the hamburger menu on the wiki, move the mouse to it, then select 'Translate to English" from the menu that pops up
</code></pre>
That last one is an example of one of Keyboard Maestro's superpowers: search for an image anywhere on screen, then take an action on it (move the mouse there, click it, etc.). Very very handy for automating things that can't easily be otherwise automated.
By far my favorite keyboard macro tool on MacOS. Great gui interface for making and recording macros. I think it is without a peer on any platform<p>I am well versed in AutoHotKey for Windows and have written 1000s of lines of macros in it, but Keyboard Maestro makes it so easy to create complex macros for even one time tasks.<p>Linux is certainly lacking in tools to automate the GUI.
Been using it for a long time but found myself more and more using Shortcuts and HammerSpoon instead.<p>Maybe a few very basic things that I still have in KM are stuff like “paste as keyboard strokes”, muting my audio when stuff changes and the occasionally keyboard shortcut remap (because it syncs across my machines in contrast to the macOS native thing)<p>Curious what the people here use KM for. What are some of your use cases?
Just a terrific application and one I look forward to paying for an upgrade to every two years or so. I looked back at my serial numbers in 1Password and they go back to version 5, so I’ve been a user for at least a decade and the app just gets better and better.
Keyboard Maestro is one of the excellent software tools that I use daily. The power to configure and customize keystrokes is a godsend. I'm not affiliated, merely a very satisfied customer for years.
I've been using BetterTouchTool ever since I got a Mac with a TouchBar that I wanted to make useful, and it has slowly taken over keyboard macros + gesture menus + multi-machine clipboard etc. Anybody here who has experience with both and might like to comment to compare them?
Keyboard Maestro is an integral part of how I use a computer. I've been using it since 2005 (v2) and it's easily among the primary reasons I can't imagine using a different OS platform. Thank you, Peter Lewis.
Also a very satisfied customer (since 2015). I’ve used this to do everything from making clunky software easier to use to automating aspects of games that I didn’t want to do manually.<p>Clunky software example: connect to cisco vpn each day, handling all the prompts it makes you go through.<p>Another is to type out what’s in my copy buffer, for websites that don’t let you paste your password in.<p>Gaming example was re-casting spells when they came off cooldown in Diablo 2/3.<p>I’ve written hundreds of macros over the years and this app has saved me a ton of time and frustration. And probably some RSI too.
I bought version 10 recently enough that I was emailed this week with a free upgrade to version 11 which I appreciated!<p>I mainly only use it for text expansion, but it has served me well for years.
I was actually going to make a post about software that you actually enjoy paying for and I was going to use Keyboard Maestro as one of those examples.<p>Truly remarkable piece of software.
I love the palette feature, which allows me to create shortcuts exactly two keystrokes long:
<a href="https://www.notesfromandy.com/2014/08/01/double-hotkeys-with-keyboard-maestro/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.notesfromandy.com/2014/08/01/double-hotkeys-with...</a><p>This feature is just a sliver of all the power of Keyboard Maestro. I'm sure there are many potentially life-changing gems among the features I haven't yet explored.
Everyone in the comments swems to be in love with KM. I wonder, what do you all use it for? It sounds like I’m missing out on a lot, but when I’m thinking about it, nothing in need of automation comes to mind. That is, except for opening a few common apps and window management. What am I missing?
This has to be one of the longest actively developed niche software products i'm aware of. I've been using it since school and now i'm a grown-up bearded man.