Simple but useful Keyboard Maestro workflow

macOS
1

I’ve been using Keyboard Maestro for a while, often to do pretty complicated things. I just stumbled on what might be my most useful workflow yet, and it’s absurdly simple:

I have a folder of macros that work in all apps. Every one of the macros uses the same hotkey. As a result, pressing it pulls up a palette of options — the trick @MacSparky has mentioned on the podcast several times.

The macros are almost identical similar — most just open a single app each (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Drafts, Messages, etc.); a few use a simple shell script to open a particular folder on my hard drive in the Finder. That’s all.

The beauty of it is that I can hit the hotkey, start typing the first 1-2 letters of the app or folder name, and bang — I’m there. It’s even faster than using Spotlight, because I don’t have to hit Return, and it doesn’t try to predict what I’m typing (which can be useful in Spotlight … but also can be annoying). I expect it to get even faster as muscle memory takes over.

I would guess I’m about the last KM user to figure this one out, but I’m having a lot of fun mostly abandoning the Cmd-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab... that used to be such a big part of my day.

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I have one of these - with the Caps Lock key (thanks to Karabiner Elements) as the triggering hyper key.

I also appreciate the simplicity of use.

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3

Hmm…interesting. I actually have hotkeys to fire up my most-used apps, and rely on Alfred for the others. Your suggestion requires more keystrokes, but dramatically reduces the number of dedicated keystrokes that I have defined.

This might be a way to combine of my approaches resulting in a net-gain of convenience and a reduction in dedicated hotkey triggers. Thanks!

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That was more or was my situation. I was running g out of dedicated keystrokes. Or at least, I was running out of memory (my own!).

The nice thing about this approach is that I can have aliases. I could have Gmail and Email do the same thing.

So far I don’t think I’ve had to type more than two letters for any app or folder (out of a couple dozen) except Finder and Firefox. So I just made it FFirefox. Problem solved.

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A Hyperkey means I don’t have to remember as many keys. It’s just CapsLock and then “disambiguation navigation”. :slight_smile:

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