Keyboard Maestro
Mac Tip #186/09-Mar-2005

Following on from last week’s Tip about keeping your hands on the keyboard, one application I’d like to mention is Keyboard Maestro (US$20).

It offers many useful features, but the particular reason I use it is that it allows me to set up one keystroke to carry out multiple actions.

For example, one regular piece of work I do for a client involves opening up half a dozen documents, a folder, an email mailbox, Virtual PC, and several web addresses in Safari. That’s a lot of clicking just to get started on my work for the day. So I set up a Keyboard Maestro macro.

I set up one keystroke which carries out 13 separate steps, though some of those are actually scripts which each run several steps themselves. In all, I save about 20 or more different clicks with this one macro.

Once I’m underway on that work I often need to copy text from a window in Internet Explorer within Virtual PC, clean the text up a bit and paste it into a new Tex-Edit Plus window ready for more work. This could be about 8 or 10 steps, but again I need only issue one keystroke to make them all happen.

If you find yourself repeatedly carrying out the same steps — choosing menu items, opening windows, opening documents or programs, clicking — then it’s worth trying out Keyboard Maestro.