Hi!
This is part 2 of my series of posts on productivity with a Mac Pro. If you want to check all posts about this series, hit the `mac-productivity-series` tag below.
In this post, I'll talk about Keyboard Maestro (KM) and the best 36$ USD you'll spend today. KM brags about being “The most powerful Mac productivity and automation app available” and they are not lying!
It can be a little rough in the beginning, but once you get familiar with its internals, you can automate almost every recurring task on your Mac (KM is only available in MacOS as of today).
The premise is simple: Based on triggers, a group of actions can be performed. Such actions include Insert Text by typing or pasting, execute Shell Scripts, execute JavaScript in Browser, add control flows like for-each and if-then-else to control a group of tasks as well as working with a very extensive group of clipboards
Here are a few tasks that I automate using Keyboard Maestro:
write canned responses in Zendesk using a few keystrokes
write extensive CLI commands such as `curl` or `dig` with predefined variables
scrape Zendesk Ticket details (such as priority, ticket ID, and requester email) and store them in variables
use those variables to make GitHub API calls to create Issues with dynamic body messages
automatically transform tickets into Incidents and nest them under open Problem Tickets in Zendesk
Writing macros can be very easy and intuitive as KM's interface is user-friendly:
On top of this, KM has a very active community over at https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/ that is ready to help out if you have any questions. They are really that helpful!
I've ust scratched the surface of this tool and hope to build more in the future!
Cheers
G