

With Keyboard Maestro, you can create conflict palettes, script menu bar selections, and do so much more that is not and never will be possible with Shortcuts. There is no faster way to create simple automations between applications than Shortcuts when you have robust built-in support in the participating apps.Īll that said, Keyboard Maestro is significantly more powerful. It can work, but it takes a lot of work.Īnother thing Shortcuts is good for is inter-app automation, provided those apps have Shortcuts support. For example, I usually write AppleScripts when working with contacts in Keyboard Maestro. Those things are possible with Keyboard Maestro but in ways that are not nearly as user-friendly as Shortcuts.

Some of the better uses of Shortcuts are for working with personal data like contacts and calendar entries.
Streamdeck keyboard maestro mac#
If you’ve ever used Shortcuts on your iPhone or iPad, you get essentially the same toolset on the Mac with Shortcuts for the Mac. Regardless, the two tools will remain very different. I fully expect they will get things sorted out over time, and in the end, we’ll have a stable version of Shortcuts for the Mac to go along with an already stable version of Keyboard Maestro. It’s had a rocky start, but the Shortcuts team has the right idea for Shortcuts for Mac, and they are increasingly overcoming the significant technical changes between the iPhone/iPad and the Mac. I’ve spent a lot of time working with Shortcuts for Mac.
Streamdeck keyboard maestro for mac#
Specifically, is Shortcuts for Mac going to replace Keyboard Maestro? In a word, no. My exploration of the Stream Deck Mini has taken me to a bunch of very interesting places in Keyboard Maestro and elsewhere-more on those at a later time-but this simple URL-based integration has actually had the biggest impact.I’ve had a lot of questions about the relationship between Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts for Mac. (This process will even work if HomeControl Menu isn’t running, because macOS will launch any app that’s registered to receive a particular URL scheme if it’s not open.) Automation URLs from Home Control Menu are prefaced by the homecontrol protocol handler, and when the Stream Deck app hands that URL off to macOS, it does the right thing-namely pass the URL on to HomeControl Menu, which toggles my lights. The Stream Deck’s default set of actions includes one called Website, which is designed to open a page in your default browser.

With that knowlege in hand, setting up Stream Deck buttons to control my lights became extremely easy. But that’s not all HomeControl Menu does-it also supports automation via custom URLs. In January I wrote about HomeControl Menu, a utility that puts control of HomeKit devices in your Mac’s menu bar. (Even though it’s a Catalyst app, it could be made scriptable if Apple wanted to-witness Dice By PCalc, which recently added scripting support.)įortunately, I figured out a solution. Here’s the problem: The Home app on the Mac isn’t scriptable. And I immediately wondered if I could assign buttons to turn the lights in my office on and off. Controlling HomeKit via Stream Deck is easy with Home Control URLs.Īfter much hesitation and research, I recently bought a Stream Deck Mini.
