 If you want to be more productive on your Mac, then you may be interested in a little piece of software called Keyboard Maestro, and I'm gonna introduce it in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec, and in this video, we're talking about one of my favorite pieces of software, Keyboard Maestro. I would say that this, combined with a couple of other productivity tools, Hazel, which I did a video on the other day, so I'll leave a link to that in the top corner, and also TextExpander, I nearly forgot it then, is that important, TextExpander as well. These three together form really sort of the backbone of my productivity and automation workflows on the Mac, so they really are an important part of my day-to-day work, really. Now, there isn't enough time to give you a full overview of Keyboard Maestro. If this video was 24 hours long, I'd still be talking at the end of it. I use it that much, and for that many different things, there is no end of possibilities with it, really, as you will soon find out. But what is it exactly? Well, it is quite a simple application at its core. It basically looks for some form of trigger, and then once it sees that trigger, it performs some sort of action. And the thing that makes it so amazing is all of the different kinds of triggers that you can have, and then all of the different sorts of actions that can be performed with it, as we'll see when we dig into the application. And those give a sort of almost limitless number of possibilities of what you could actually do with it. And the other thing is that it can work with so many different applications and different ways of integrating into your system that it really is an amazing piece of software. But I'll let you be the judge of that. So where do you get it from, and how much does it cost? Well, I'll tell you that first of all, because you're not gonna believe this. It is $38, and I'll say you're not gonna believe it. You'll have to try it first to understand the real power of it. So it is from KeyboardMaestro.com, and it is, as it says on the front, the Premiere Mac automation software, and I would definitely agree with that statement. So you can get a free trial of it, just click the big download button at the top here, and then you can also click the buy now button to go and buy the software. And as I say, it is, did I say the price right? Let's find out, shall we? All the suspense now suddenly, look at this, my internet's so slow, isn't it? Why has that happened? Of all times, it's been lightning fast up until now. There you go, $36, did I say 36? I don't know, that's how much it is anyway. And for the amount of time and sort of productivity that I've got out of this app for $36, it really is just an awesome piece of software, an awesome value. But let's get into showing you how it works, shall we, instead of just waffling on, as I often do. So I'm gonna show you the interface. In fact, before I show you the interface, when you download it and go to install it, this is one of those apps that is sort of deeply rooted into your Mac's system. And so when you go through the install process, it will just prompt you to go and give access to it to a number of different levels in your security and privacy settings of your system preferences in the Mac. It will tell you where to go to activate that and to give it those permissions, but just to be aware of not to be worried about that. If it's asking for access to your full disk access and things like that, it needs that to be able to do the thing that it does. So with that out of the way, let's have a look at what the actual app interface looks like. So we've basically got, let me just resize this a bit. That's a bit unprofessional, isn't it? Look at that extra space there. There we go. So we've basically got quite a simple interface, in my view, where we've got essentially three different columns. So we've got this column here, this column and this column. This column over here is basically, it's groups of macros. So the little actions that we're gonna create, the little sort of small programs that we're gonna create within Keyboard Maestro are all called macros. And the macros are listed in this column, but we can group those, because once you get large numbers, then it would be a bit tricky to see them all in a big list. And so you can create little groups of macros. And so this is where you create those groups, essentially just like a folder. Hence they all look like little folders. So within each of these folders, we've then got the actual macros themselves that are contained in there. And then this window on the right-hand side, the larger window, is basically where we define anything to do with the actual, the groups or the macros, depending on what we've got selected. So now we have the Keyboard Filters group of macros selected. And over here, you can see that this is a folder, a group, and it's got the name of it. So I could change the name of it there. And I can also add a few extra little details here, such as, is this group of macros enabled? So you could have a group of macros that you either toggle on or off together all at once. So that's where you would do that. And you might have a set of macros that you want to work just for a specific application. And so you can do that at the group level by saying here that you want it available in all applications, or you could just select some specific applications, or you might want it to work in everything except certain applications. So this is where we can select that. And by the way, these settings that are here are the defaults. So by default, when you create a new group, it is enabled, it will work in all applications, in all windows, and so on. So yes, you can also select that you want it to work only in a specific window. So for example, you might have some macros that you want to run when you're on a specific website. And so you could enable it for only working in Safari, but also only in Windows, where the title was the name of the website that you're on, for example. So that is where you would specify that. And then you've got this list of macros. And as I say, if you just click on one of these macros, then this window then changes to be the way to define those macros. So what I thought I'd do is I'd create a couple of simple macros just to give you a sort of taste of what it can do. And in doing so, you will see the sort of process that we use to create the macros. And also you'll see all the different sort of triggers that we can use, and then also the range of different types of action we can perform as well. So the first thing I'm gonna do is create a new group of macros. So what we do is we come to the groups column and then click on the little plus button down at the bottom here. And so now we've got untitled macro group, but over here you can see the text is highlighted in the title. So I'm just gonna call this demo group, very original. And then what I'm gonna do is now that we've got a group, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create our first macro. So I'm gonna come down to the macros column and at the bottom of here, we've also got a plus button. So I'm going to click on the plus and this is called untitled macro. Now, the macro that I'm gonna use as a sort of initial demonstration here is I'm gonna create a little macro that basically minimizes all of the windows on the screen so that if ever you want to just totally clear all of the windows and get rid of them all off the screen, we can do that. Now, unbelievably, well, I'll say unbelievably, it is believable. There is no single hotkey to do this on the Mac unlike at Windows where there is a single key that you can press or keyboard shortcut to actually just minimize all windows. They don't have anything like that on the Mac. What they do have is you can minimize all windows of the current application or you can minimize all windows of everything except the current application. So you can achieve this by pressing two separate keyboard shortcuts, but not with a single keyboard shortcut. And so that is what I'm gonna program today by way of an example. So what I'm gonna call this macro is basically hide all windows like that. And then this now is gonna show an example of how we actually set this up. And what we've got here is we've got the title of the macro and then at the top we've got our triggers. So you can see we've got a little plus icon to add new trigger. So here we can put in as many different triggers as we want and you can have them stacked as well. So you can have just one trigger or you could have two triggers that have to happen at the same time or together or you could have two triggers where one or the other could be true. And so you can sort of build up really quite complex series of triggers like that. Next we have the actions. And so the actions basically the same, we can just add in actions down here. And once again, you can have as many different actions as you want. And so you can have it perform multiple different things from one trigger or multiple triggers performing multiple different things. So let's have a look shall we at some of these triggers? If I click on the little plus icon, what you see is that brings up a list of different types of triggers. And this already looks like quite a long list but actually within each of these there are various different ways that you can format them and set them up as well. So there's actually multiple times more than these triggers available. Now what we're going to do is hide all windows. So the way that I'm going to do this is I'm going to set a hotkey, which is anything we want really but I'll use command alt control H to hide all windows. And we're going to use a hotkey trigger for that. So anything where you're setting basically a keyboard shortcut, you're going to use these hotkeys. But just while we're in here, let's have a look at some of the other types of trigger that there are so that you can get an idea of the sort of things you might be able to do with it. So we've got a keyboard hotkey trigger here is the first one. But then let me just pick out a few of these other ones. So for example, application trigger. So you can have certain things that happen when an application either opens or shuts or is open. So that can be as part of a combination. You only want the thing to trigger when a particular application is open or when an application opens up, like I say. So I have one that turns my computer onto do not disturb mode when I open zoom because I only open zoom when I'm going to have a meeting and I don't want to be disturbed during the meeting. So that is an example of a macro that I have set up where you have the application trigger, zoom opens and then the action is turn on do not disturb. And then I have a second one. I think you know where this is going. When zoom closes turn off do not disturb. So that is an example of how you might use an application trigger. Another option for the application trigger is say you are using some recording software such as Ecum Live as I do and you only open that up when you are about to record then you may want it to shut down a load of other apps or in fact shut down every other app when you open up that particular application. So that would be a way of doing that. So let me have a look at some of these others. Keyboard, sorry, clipboard. So that is if you want to have specific clipboard actions. So for example, when you copy something to the clipboard maybe it's going to say when you copy an image to the clipboard you want it to do something with it. You can have that. Another option that you have in here is a good one is actually down here at the bottom of the wireless network trigger. So this one, you can have your computer change states or do different things depending on which wireless network you are connected to. So for example, your favorite coffee shop you could have a trigger so that when you connect to the wifi of your coffee shop maybe you don't want to start syncing your computer or doing downloads or anything like that so you can have it turn off those features. So that is another one. Another option you've got for a trigger here is a time of day. So if you want to run some backup tasks or something like that that you want to do at the end of the day or when you're not working then you can set up triggers in that way. So there are, as you can see, lots of different ones and I've only just touched on a couple of them really. And indeed when you go into each of these ones you have multiple different options within those triggers themselves as well. So let's go back to the one that we're just focused on at the moment and this is the hotkey trigger. And now that I've got this selected it's basically just got this highlighted for me to type the keyboard shortcut or just press it. So if I just press the keys, there we go. So I've now set my keyboard shortcut as that. Control option command H. And then you have some other options even at this level as well. So basically that is my keyboard shortcut. And now do I want this to trigger when this is pressed or do I want to do it when it's held down or do I want to perform the action when it is released or is tapped, tapped once, tapped twice, tapped three times, tapped four times. So you can have little actions if you want to just say double tap on a key and it will start the action. You also have that option there as well. You can also have some things where maybe you want it to do one thing when you hold it down and then another thing when you take it off. So for example, if you wanted to, I don't know, have a little mute button that was muted while you were holding the key down and then unmute when you hold it off like a sort of, they call it a cough button. So that if you're on a Zoom call, you can just quickly press and hold it down and then take your finger off and it will unmute. That might be quicker than pressing the mute button and unmute. So lots of different options that you can have here within terms of how this trigger actually works. So then the next thing is, by the way, we could actually add a whole series of other triggers in here, as I say, just by clicking the plus and just setting a new trigger as well. And it would just add it to this list. But for now we're just gonna stick with something simple and one trigger. So now we're gonna add the action. And if you remember, the action is we want to minimize all of the windows or hide all of the windows. So we're gonna click on the new action. And what you'll notice is when I click on new action, there'll be a panel slide up from the bottom with all of the actions. So there we go. And now what we've got is we've got two separate columns. One is categories, as in categories of actions and the other column is the actions themselves. And there is a little search bar just at the top, excuse me, where we can actually search for an action. And so you can see that these are basically grouped to make it easier to find. And if I just give you a taste of some of the actions that you might want to perform, like for example, images. So you can perform actions on images such as, well, there's a good one that I use, OCR image. So if you have images and there's text in it and you want to use optical character recognition, then you can actually do that from within here. You can do that with things like, I use Hazel to sort my things like bank statements and things like that that are brought down into my downloads folder. The video that I did on Hazel the other day tells you about how to automate moving things out of your downloads folder and filing them away from you for you. And then you can also use keyboard maestro to perform optical character recognition and pull out little bits of information and things like that on an image and add it into the file names, things like that. You can also read a file or write to a file. So you have different shortcuts for this is in the image section actually, but I use this with text, for example, so a lot of my notes and things like that are just in raw text files, so .txt. That's my sort of notes system is just text files because then they all translate across to everything rather than a specific application, like I know people use Evernote, but I don't like being sort of bound to one ecosystem. So I use text files a lot and then I have keyboard maestro be able to append notes to different text files and things like that. So you can do that with keyboard maestro. You can also do things like flipping image, rotate image, all these sorts of things. You can also change the DPI, the dots per inch, the resolution of the image and crop and resize images. So one of the actions that I have is basically from my web design days is being able to have an image and then I want to resize them to a specific size. And then sometimes I also want to have a sort of thumbnail image of that at a lower resolution and also a smaller size. So I've got a keyboard maestro macro that basically takes the image, resizes it, puts it in a particular folder, creates another copy of it, resizes that, changes the resolution and puts that in my little thumbnails folder for websites and things like that. You can do all manner of different things. And as I say, that one I've just mentioned is a case of a sort of multi-action macro that basically does a whole series of actions on something. And like I say, the list of what you can do is pretty endless. So what else can we do with images? So you can get image sizes, get information, get file information and things like that from them. And this is just all in the image group or category of actions. There's also things like web, so you can open a URL. So if you want to open a URL, go and get some information and copy that and paste it somewhere else, then you can do all of these sorts of things with here. There are really a huge amount of things, files. You can get a file, copy files, duplicate files, all of these sorts of things. Get file attributes, file, the file size, all this sort of stuff. There's really a huge amount of stuff that you can do. So what you would need to do is download the free trial and just go and have a look at some of these actions. In fact, this is the sort of main actions list and I'll just scroll down through it. There is an absolute load of things. And as I say, for each of these actions, there are a huge number of different variations that you can actually perform on them as well in ways that you can sort of tweak it to your exact requirements. And I haven't got into a third party plugins for Keyboard Maestro either. There are different scripts and things like that that you can download that have already been created for you. But now today, what we're gonna do is stick with something basic, which is basically hide all windows. And it's quite convenient because there is just a simple Keyboard Maestro command already in here. So I've just typed hide in the search bar and as you can see, we've got a couple of options, hide a specific application or hide all applications as the second one down. And that is the one that we want. So all I'm gonna do to add this into our actions palette over here is just click on this one. And then that has gone down to hide all applications. What you'll find is with these actions, there will always be this little cogwheel where you can have some different options. So you can always just try the action or you can disable it. So you might want to leave it in a workflow or in a macro, but then just disable it for the time being. You can rename it if you've got multiple instances. Then sometimes it's good to be able to rename the macro so that you know exactly what it is. Obviously in this case, hide all applications. It's pretty self-explanatory. You can also change the color. So you can actually change the color of the macro, sorry, of the action within the macro. This is good if you have start building out really long things and you want to sort of color code them. So I do that with some of my things or if you've got sort of key elements that you need to know which ones you might want to go back and edit, then it's a good way to highlight things like that. You can also add notes and things like that, copy, text, images, and so on. So there's, and also by the way, there's this option down here, which I don't know if I'm just getting it in. We move that over a bit. There is some sort of logic that you can perform to these actions. So as well as having it do all of them together, you can also add some logic. So basically like if then statements or while statements. So basically creating loops where it does something while another criteria is true. And so that's where you would have those and repeating and all this sort of stuff or carrying on until a certain point and so on. And then you can also have it go and bring in another macro and various different things like that. So there are, as I say, at every step of the way, what you'll find is although the interface is basic, there is lots of ways that you can layer on different levels of, I suppose, complexity really. But we have just started with something very basic. So I'm going to close this down now. And now what you can see is basically we've got our demo group that we created. We've got our first macro called hide all windows, which is what I named it. And we've got our keyboard shortcut, which is that. And then this is where we've defined our macro. Now, if I press that keyboard shortcut, what we'll find is everything disappears. And that has now worked and basically moved all of, minimized all of my windows. So let me bring them back again. What I want to also show you is how if you use the stream deck, you can actually do all of this from stream deck as well, without actually using the keyboard shortcut. You can obviously use the keyboard shortcut with keyboard maestro. But what I'm going to show you is something a little bit different. Now, if I just minimize all my windows again, try that macro, and then I'm just going to open my, here we go with my stream deck and I've created a little folder. I don't normally use folders these days, but I've created one just so that I can demonstrate how we can integrate keyboard maestro with stream deck. So first of all, we're going to come up to this little icon up here for the plugins on stream deck. I'm going to get all of these terms mixed around. And in the plugin section, whoops, a daisy, I was just in it, but I've, here we go. So in the plugin section, if you go up to the search bar and start typing keyboard maestro, what you'll see is there is a plugin here by stairway software. Now that is the makers of keyboard maestro and they have made their own plugin for the stream deck. And so you can install it by clicking on this blue button here. And you may have noticed that I haven't actually got it installed. And that is because there is a much better, in my mind, plugin for keyboard maestro for the stream deck. And that is a third party one and it's just called KMLINK. And I would recommend you give that one a go because it is much easier to just activate your macros this way. Have a look at keyboard maestro plugin as well by all means. I just find it's a little bit more clunky and the way that you program what macros you want to run is just not necessarily the most intuitive. Whereas this one, as you will see, is so easy to use. Let's go and have a little look now and you'll see what I mean. Basically, this now fits in your stream deck. You'll see in this custom column here, this custom group of actions. You've got this one KMLINK. And that's all it is. It's a plugin with one single action and you just drag it across to your stream deck. And then what you do is you can give the action a title, obviously, just as you're familiar with if you use stream deck, but then you just select the macro from your list and it pulls up all of your macros that you've got in your keyboard maestro. And so here we've got our demo group. Hang on a minute. I'm off the bottom of the screen sharing so you can't see it. There we go. We've got this one here, hide all windows. So if I click on this one, so now I've got this button programmed into my stream deck and then what I'm gonna do is move this out of the way and I'll just bring up that other window again, like this. And then if I press the button on my stream deck now, it is gonna hide all windows. It is simple as that. So definitely KMLINK for me is the way to go because as you can see, it's so easy to just program. Now let's have a look at another example, shall we? Just one more example before I go. And as I say, I will be doing a whole series of videos all about this and how you can create much more advanced macros. And then also how I use it with stream deck as well because you can do some quite advanced things with it if you just sort of program various different things in with this and in combination with stream deck. So let's create one now. As an example, how about one for if you want to say, start a particular program. And when you're doing that, you don't want all of the other programs running. So for example, Ecamm Live might be an example of that. If I want to say, I want a button that is gonna basically open my Ecamm Live but then shut all of my other applications, then what I would do is I would come back down to my macros here and I'm gonna click on the plus icon. And now I'm gonna call this one start Ecamm. And by the way, in case you were not aware, I think most of my viewers probably are by now. If you weren't aware, Ecamm Live is the live production software that I use to make these videos. So there is a very real reason why you may want to have Ecamm Live open and everything else shut so that it doesn't interfere with your production and you don't get all sorts of other things going on. So that is why you might want to do that. So I'm gonna call this one start Ecamm and I'm gonna add a trigger. I'll just do a simple one again with a keyboard trigger and we'll do like this command option control E. And when that's pressed, what it's gonna do is we want a new action and we want it to open Ecamm Live. So this is actually, you can search for open but actually the way it's referred to in here is activate. So you both will work but activated specifically for activating an application. So I can come over to here and then you can see activate specific application. So I'm gonna click on that one. And then it's asking for the application to activate. So that's saying finder, but we don't want finder. We want Ecamm Live. So I'm using the beta, click on Ecamm Live like that. So that is what we've done there. And the next thing we want to do is basically quit all other apps. So now I've just realized I'm doing this the wrong way around already because what it's gonna do is it's gonna open Ecamm Live and then quit everything including that. So let's quit the other apps first, shall we? So if I type in quit, started typing quit. We've got here quit a specific application or quit all applications. So I'm gonna click on quit all applications like that. And what I'm gonna do is I'm also just going to drag this up above that one so that it quits the applications first and then it opens the Ecamm Live afterwards. So now I'm not gonna do this now, but now this would, if I pressed the shortcut and I didn't have Ecamm Live open, basically it would close everything and open Ecamm Live. Now I've just realized another thing that I would probably want to do in my specific case is I would also want to make sure I had got my audio hijack open. So I'm also gonna activate audio hijack because that is what I use for my thing, whoopsie daisy, I've done the wrong one there. By the way, that's a good example. I almost looked like I intended that, didn't I? If you ever you want to get rid of one, you can see that I'm just, one of the active one is highlighted with a little blue border. So I'll just click on delete and it just deletes it out. So I want to activate a specific application again and then this one I would just set as audio hijack. So there we go, that is basically for me to set up my Ecamm Live by closing everything else and starting Ecamm Live. You can also exclude applications if you don't want to close everything down, but that is just a little example of how you would go about creating some macros and as you can see, we've got a couple of macros in here. So what I'm doing at the moment is I'm just sort of transferring my macros across from my other computer and building them out and clearing some of them out, because some of them are related to jobs and tasks that I was doing eight or 10 years ago that I just don't do anymore. So I'm sort of having a bit of a spring clean of all of my macros, but as I go through, then what I'm going to do is, as I say, just build out this whole series of keyboard maestro videos. Now, it can be a little bit daunting to see all of the things that you can do with it, but the way to approach keyboard maestro and Hazel for that matter, and also the other one that I mentioned, TextExpander in my view is not to try and plan out all of the things that you may want to do and create macros for them, but rather just know the capabilities of them and have them there on your Mac. And then as you go through your daily workflow and you notice that there is something that you are doing repeatedly, or every day or several times a day or every week or whatever it is, then just notice those things and notice and understand and that those things can often be done by things like keyboard maestro and Hazel. And so slowly, but surely integrate those into your workflow. And what you'll find is in a decade's time, or however long you'll realize you've got thousands of these things that have just become total second nature to you and are just all working in the background and you are becoming far more productive. But you don't have to wait 10 years, by the way. That sounds a bit of a long way away. You can see a difference in a matter of days and weeks, but basically what I'm saying is you don't have to sort of think that you've got to do everything all at once. Just build it up bit by bit and it will certainly pay dividends to you. Well, I hope you've found that interesting. And if you've got any specific questions, by the way, about keyboard maestro, then feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you want to see any specific macros or you've got any use cases that you would like to explore further, then leave those in the comments as well. And I'll be happy to do any demos that anybody wants related to keyboard maestro. As I say, it's a big topic and I'm gonna make a few more videos about it because it really is one of those things that pays dividends for people who actually integrate it into their workflow. So as I say, leave any questions or comments you've got down below and while you're down there, don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel and why not share it with somebody else who needed a bit more productivity in their Mac lives as well. So that's all for this video, but don't go anywhere because there's more great videos coming up next over on the right-hand side. Have a great day, everyone.