Why Not? Another Cough Button Macro

This was really more of an exercise to reproduce Brett’s cough button but with Keyboard Maestro.

The cough button is comprised of two macros. There is a macro for the active button (“Cough Down”) and the inactive state (“Cough Up”).

The first macro watches for the keyboard state of ctrl-opt-cmd and Down Arrow to trigger.

When triggered, the macro grabs the current input volume and saves it to a Keyboard Maestro variable.1 It then runs a one line AppleScript to set the volume to zero. The rest of the macro provides some visual feedback with a Growl notification and a nice little red target in the center of the screen.

The real trick is turning the input volume back on when the hotkeys are released. That’s straight forward. There’s a KM trigger for that. Here’s the macro to return the input volume to normal.

Again, there’s a nice little Growl notification and visual target displayed in the center of the screen.

So, some fun with KM and a handy little microphone mute switch.

  1. Remember, KM variables are system variable and are permanent. They persist through macros and even reboots. ↩︎