I can select some text and in an instant get a list of all my macros for tweaking text. In this way, a great many macros can be triggered from just a couple of keyboard shortcuts.įor example, I have mapped most of my macros for manipulating selected text to the control-space hot key. It’s not obvious, but the items in the list can be selected by using the keyboard too (fn + number). If the same keyboard shortcut is assigned to multiple KM macros, a pop-up pallette is displayed to select a specific macro. KM provides a perfect solution to the “too many triggers” problem. Quicksilver, TextExpander and Dropbox all felt like a revelation that needed to be shared with everyone. To some degree, every great application feels a little like that. Remember that feeling you had when you first discovered the Mac and wanted to go around shaking everyone trying to open their eyes to something better. I’ve become a huge Keyboard Maestro nerd. I use TE daily, but I use it for a very specific purpose. There is a way to make it feel like a Quicksilver replacement but it has never been satisfying to me. While the snippets can contain scripts, they can not be triggered by hot keys. Look no further than Brett’s site to see some of the amazing things it can do. There is definately power to weild but it’s not what I’m looking for. That still doesn’t feel right.ĪppleScripts in LaunchBar are even less flexible than triggering services. That measn the workflow is a bit awkward and requires using Instant Send followed by selecting the service and then pasting the result back to the text document. If text needs to be sent to a service by LaunchBar, it must first be loaded into LaunchBar. LaunchBar behave very much like a separate helper application than it does a system service. Unfortunately, the behavior is a little less than ideal. LaunchBar has the ability to trigger any installed service. That’s not the case with a keyboard shortcut. Often, I can misspell what I am looking for and it will still show up in the list of options. I simply start typing what I want and LaunchBar figures the rest out. One of the reasons for that, is there’s very little to remember. Everything else just wastes time if I have to lookup the shortcut. I really only remember the macros I use a lot. Personally I can only remember about a dozen snippet triggers and keyboard shortcuts. The problem with shortcuts for macros, is that after awhile there are just too many to remember. In reality, TextExpander is much easier to use and greatly simplifies snippet management and syncing. That means to some degree a large amount of snippet handling can be done natively with the default OS. Once the service is installed, it can easily be mapped to a keyboard shortcut. Automator makes the process of creating text services very easy. Services are great in Lion (and Snow Leopard). I am not a savant with LaunchBar, TextExpander or Keyboard Maestro, so there may be better solutions that what I describe. So I started to play around with various methods of triggering scripts and macros. That is simple, but I have more services than I care to admit. After posting one of my macros for Keyboard Maestro tweeted that there is a simpler way: Create a service with one line of Shell script.
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