Cheat Sheet Macros

Here are a few Keyboard Maestro macros that I find very handy. I call them “cheat sheets” but they are essentially a scratch pad system. This is made possible by the persistent nature of Keyboard Maestro variables. They persistent even through restarts.

The workflow for this system goes something like this:

<li>Browse around and see some text I want to remember</li>

<li>Copy to clipboard and hit opt-cmd-V to bring up my scratch board HUD</li>

<li>Hit "b" to add the content to the cheat sheet</li>

<li>Later… hit opt-cmd-V and then "d" to get a pop-up window with the text.</li>

The text can be edited and copied as well. The window can be left open without interfering with other macros. In fact, the window can be left open and the cheat macros used with other content. It’s like little temporary post-it notes.

I run two different macros for adding content to the cheat sheet. One macro appends the clipboard to the top and one replaces the content with the current clipboard.

And here’s the macro for displaying the text.

These macros only work with text. There is no image support. It’s a pretty darn fast way to collect a bunch of text and keep it readily available. The example in the screenshot was while I was working on an AppleScript and I want a quick “snapshot” of the current state.

I have a couple other macros that truly are cheat sheets. One displays the MultiMarkdown tags and another shows some of my less used TextExpander shortcuts. Of course, I keep this stuff in Simplenote too, but it’s much faster to lookup by hitting a couple of macro hotkeys than doing a search in NVAlt.