Automation on Mac OS?

[maxd]

Anyone into this sort of thing? I’ve started using Keyboard Maestro several weeks ago and now that I’m (slowly) getting up to speed with it I’m pretty impressed.

So far I’ve built simple macros — that you typically bind to whatever hotkey patterns you prefer OR to a “palette” which is a popup menu to select the desired macro from — to reformat text in various scenarios, open special folders, etc.

At this point I’m a little overwhelmed by how vast a topic this is and am wondering if there are others out there in Casinomeister-land who’ve gone before me on this. It really feels like falling down the rabbit hole sometimes.

In case anyone is wondering WTF I’m talking about here’s a _very_ simple example:

 

[justdoit]

I use more of Command-Space bar for spotlight search, to record video or to take screenshot is Shift-Command-5

 

[justdoit]

if you have 2 Mac`s you can share screen from laptop to mini by using your Wifi, you can also have all your pages or apps open on left coner by switching on stage manager , is good future if you work on multi pages

 

[Webzcas]

Yes I do that with my iMac and M2 Pro Macbook Pro

 

[thr0b]

The Automator app is built in, and surprisingly powerful. I don’t use it much these days, but have done in the past.

I think the app I use to automatically switch between from wifi to Ethernet when it detects a cable was someone’s work in Automator.

 

[maxd]

Yeah, I started with Automator but apparently it’s being (slowly) phased out in favour of Shortcuts. While I was looking into Shortcuts and Applescript I came across Keyboard Maestro (KM) and saw a great many reports that it was the bee’s knees for this kind of work. I poked around, saw there was a lot of good documentation and user community stuff for KM, saw how extensive it was and was pretty much sold on going that route.

So far KM has been really impressive. Some of the internal syntax and structure is a bit odd and counter-intuitive but you wrap your head around it and off you go. A lot of our work with Complaints is administrative stuff that is very repetitive and clicky-clicky when you do it all by hand so I’m slowly automating some of that with KM. It’s looking promising but the learning curve is pretty steep. Using the gazillion example KM macros online and breaking things down into little steps with simple actions seems to be the way to go, unsurprisingly.

- Max