Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
clipboard—remove styles, change case, perform a calculation, count words, and
more.
•
Google Chrome Control category, Safari Control category:
Thanks to
the actions in these categories, you can automate nearly anything in Google
Chrome or Safari—you can open a Web page, fill in and submit a form, click
buttons, create new tabs, execute JavaScripts, and more.
•
Execute category:
If your macro needs capabilities that Keyboard Maestro's
built-in actions don't provide, you can use the actions in this category to run a
shell script (as we did in
Macro #2: Change Extensions
)
, an AppleScript, or an
Automator workflow as part of your macro. (You can also apply a BBEdit text
factory—look in the Clipboard category.)
•
Find Image on Screen (Image category):
This blew my mind when I first
saw it. Keyboard Maestro can identify an area on your screen matching an
image (perhaps a cropped screenshot) that you supply, and having found that
portion of your screen, it can highlight it, move the mouse to it, or take other
actions.
Alternatively, a macro can choose to do something or not based on whether
an arbitrary portion of your screen matches an image. As just one example of
why this is interesting, a blind reader wrote to tell me he uses this feature,
in conjunction with AppleScript, to speak the status of an icon on his screen
(enabled or disabled) that he'd have no other way to determine because it's
unavailable to VoiceOver. I think that's incredibly cool. To learn more about
using this action, read
How to Assign a Hotkey to Almost Anything
by Patrick
Welker.
Tip:
Keyboard Maestro itself is VoiceOver-accessible, opening its capabilities to those
with limited sight. You can also use Keyboard Maestro's Speak Text macro to create
macros that deliver status reports verbally.
•
Variables category:
We used two variables in
Macro #2: Change Extensions
to pass the contents of fields in a dialog to a shell script. There are countless
other ways to use variables, but what I find most valuable is that they're able to
takeinformation createdordiscoveredbyoneactionandreusetheminanother
action, later in the macro.
