Smileworthy: Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard Maestro, currently developed by Australian team Stairways Software, is a great tool for Mac automation.

If you want to skip some steps when performing repeated tasks on your Mac, check out Keyboard Maestro. Here’s what some of our team has to say about it.


I spend most of my day on my Mac, both for work and fun, and Keyboard Maestro saves me time on lots of my repeated tasks.

One of my most common uses of Keyboard Maestro is for Skype. When it’s running it needs all the bandwidth it can get so I have a macro set up to pause Dropbox and other bandwidth-needing services. If I will be recording Skype for a podcast, I have another macro that pauses those services and additionally launches my recording app and creates a new TextEdit file so I can take notes.

Keyboard Maestro is like having TextExpander snippets that perform actions, and is one of the most helpful apps on my Mac.

  • Kelly, Social Media/Support Specialist

I’ve been using Keyboard Maestro for 4 years and it has come to fill in the cracks where other apps leave off.

A few of the ways I use it are as my clipboard history utility, my open window switcher, both with custom keyboard shortcuts. It’s also my Play, Pause and Skip iTunes controls, thanks to key re-mapping.

Keyboard Maestro does many seemingly small but very useful things that just make my Mac easier and faster to use.

  • Brian, Mac Developer

Keyboard Maestro is my new-found app to keep me in track. For video conferences I need to quit unneeded apps and disable my notifications, which can be tedious, but forgetting to turn all of that back on afterwards can lead to missed communications thru Mail, Slack, and my other chat apps and that is bad.

Enter Keyboard Maestro. Now, before meetings, I quit all applications, turn on Do Not Disturb and then open only those apps which I need for the meeting or presentation.

After the meeting, I launch Slack, Mail and Messages and turn back on notifications. Both of these events are issued with a simply keyboard shortcut.

  • Mike, Sales and Business Development

I use Keyboard Maestro as an automation compliment to TextExpander. My favorite macro prints the content of an email to a PDF, names the PDF with the date, allows me to type a filename, and when I’m done files the receipt in a folder named Paid.

  • Greg, Smile Founder

How do you use Keyboard Maestro? Tell us.