Quick Keyboard Maestro macro. This one is for inserting a Markdown reference style link at the end of a document. The magic is that it also insert the link at the current position in the line and maintains the insertion position in the current line. It’s all made possible by BBEdit’s “Set Jump Mark” command.
Here’s the macro:
I have a similar macro for inserting footnotes in Markdown.
I have a new saying: “If you want something done right, just pique Dr.Drang’s interest.” There’s been constant improvement to this workflow and it’s interesting to see it evolve.
Here’s a bonus macro that creates Amazon affiliate links.[1] For this one, just copy the product link from Amazon and run the macro to extract the product item and create an affiliate link.[2]
Here’s the workflow:
Visit an Amazon product page Copy the page link Switch back to a document I want the link inserted in Run the macro to have the affiliate link pasted in Here’s the AppleScript:
I need to do this often enough, I wrote a macro with some Python for it. The macro converts a url with invalid characters (such as spaces) to a safe encoded url. Importantly, the forward slashes, colons, question marks, equal signs, quotes and hashes that are necessary to pass queries and parameters are untouched by the conversion.
A common example for me is as follows. Select a URL that has bad actors in it: http://www.
I wrote about the Mac application “Fake”[1] awhile ago. From my very first use, I thought it was an incredibly clever tool. Fake is like a super-charged automator for Webkit. It makes automating interactions with webpages easy and simple. But why would I want to use Fake instead of Automator or curl or even a Python script? Here’s an example that I just started using.
If I want to add an affiliate link for a Mac or iOS app, I need to visit the Apple Link Maker page with my affiliate id as a get-parameter in the link.
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.
Tuesday Tip From Devon Technologies, makers of the excellent DevonThink and DevonAgent. Be sure to follow the link to the forums where there are several tips for using Keyboard Maestro with DevonThink.
I couldn’t resist. This came up on Twitter and I already had a similar macro running. This Keyboard Maestro macro takes the current clipboard string and pastes it into any application and then simulates the left arrow key to move the cursor back to it’s original position. This macro should be application agnostic since it uses standard keyboard input and basic AppleScript functionality. The same functionality should be possible with TextExpander as well.
Nice overview of my beloved Keyboard Maestro by Michael Schechter.
By Way of Clark’s Tech Blog
Most people are familiar with the setting a Start Up item on Mac OS X and the new Lion behavior of relaunching apps that were open at the last restart is also great. But I've also experienced the problem where I've gone away on a trip only to have iTunes crash or shutdown for some reason. That means the AppleTV is no longer able to stream SuperWhy episodes from the media Mac and that's a problem.
This walkthrough demonstrates how I use Keyboard Maestro to control applications that are not scriptable or have few exposed options.
This example creates some handy macros for quickly filing mail in Mail.app. It’s no where near the power of Mail Act-On but it does provide one of my most used features, which is hotkey triggered filling of Mail messages.
Macro Groups Before getting into the details of macro creation, I want to describe how I organize my macros.
