This will be the final waypoint in our Keyboard Maestro journey, Hope you've enjoyed the ride...
As you know, we've been able to initiate Keyboard Maestro macros by creating and using keyboard shortcuts, but you may have noticed that this was kind of a hassle when we attempted to fire up our email macro in the last segment. You might recall that I had you open a text editor and type the shortcut to run your macro. Not exactly an easy or elegant option. Fortunately, Keyboard Maestro offers a solution: Palettes.
Keyboard Maestro Control allows you to execute any Keyboard Maestro macros on your Mac as if you were sitting at your desk. This means you can perform any action Keyboard Maestro is capable of on. May 12, 2018 Keyboard Maestro 8.2.1 Free Download Latest Version for MAC OS. It is full offline installer standalone setup of Keyboard Maestro 8.2.1 Crack Serial key for macOS. Keyboard Maestro 8.2.1 Overview. Whether you are a power user or a just getting started, your time is precious.
What Are Palettes
Palettes are a simple way of turning all your macros into buttons. So all you need to do to fire off a macro is open the palette and click the button for the macro you need.
You may recall that in one of our first segments we disabled the Applications Palette. Let's re-enable that so you can see how a palette works.
When you do this you should see Keyboard Maestro's built-in application switcher/launcher. Go ahead... click some of the icons and see what it does.
Finished?
Well, this is exactly how your Keyboard Maestro palette will work with the macros you create.
Creating a Macro Palette
Creating a macro palette is super simple, although the documentation for how to do it is a little opaque:
The first menu, which should say Available in all applications lets you select which applications you want your macro palette to be available in.
The second menu, which should say Available in all windows lets you define when a palette will be available based upon which windows are open on your computer. (Try these! They're amazing!)
The third menu, which should say Always Activated is our magical palette tool.
You should now see something that looks like this:
Your palette should now appear.
Type your hotkey again to make the palette disappear.
Customizing Your Palette
You may have noticed that a small picture of a palette appeared when you clicked the Shows/hides a palette menu. While it's not obvious from looking at it, clicking that palette opens Keyboard Maestro's palette customization tool.
Click the palette and the Theme Editor opens.
Keyboard Maestro's Theme Editor is a simple customization tool that allows you to tweak the way a specific palette looks. (You can change the default palette look in Keyboard Maestro's Preferences as well as several other default palette types.)
There are limitations to how you can customize your palette but it's versatile enough for anything you'll need to do.
Spend a few minutes playing with the Theme Editor and customizing your palette.
Organizing Your Palette
By default, Keyboard Maestro organizes your macros in numerical and alphabetical order. Knowing this, and another trick, we can organize our palette so that it looks nice and makes logical sense too.
We have six macros to organize some of which really don't need to be on our palette, because, using the Counter macro as an example, that's not something we'd really use for anything other than inside another macro. Normally, I'd put macros like that in another folder, but... to have more items to put on our palette, I'm keeping all of the macros we created in this group.
To organize our palette we're going to use another macro designed to re-order and organize all the macros in a group.
First, download Dan Thomas' very cool and very sophisticated Palette Organizer (direct download link)
Once it downloads, double click it to add it to your Keyboard Maestro macro library.
The macro will be disabled by default. Enable it.
Next:
You should see the Palette Organizer window appear.
The Palette Organizer window will display a list of your selected macros and a set of tools on the left-hand side to organize those macros.
You should now see something like this:
The Palette Organizer will rename all your macros and add dividers and, when you use your hot key to open the palette, you should see something like this:
Amazing!
Thanks for taking this little Keyboard Maestro trip with me. Let me know if there are other How To's you'd be interested in seeing!
shining a light
Here's to you, Apple, for giving us something to smile about this week
Apple's brand new products gave us all an excuse to press pause on the doom and gloom of 2020.
Comments are closed.
|
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |