Time to make your first Keyboard Maestro script.

Video Transcript

Alright, let's build our first Keyboard Maestro macro, I've got the application open, we're going to create a sample group. So, go down to the bottom button here, and hit the plus sign, and we just created a group. And if any of these steps are confusing, don't worry about it. We're going to explain all of them in later videos, but I just wanted to make one to begin with. We're going to give it a name, Sample Group. And then inside that Sample Group, we're going to make a simple Keyboard Maestro script, hit the plus button again. And we're going to make this one to hide all applications. Have you ever looked at your desktop and seen it as a complete mess and just wanted to hide everything.

You can hide apps by hitting command H on the Mac, but what if you wanted to hide them all. So we're gonna say “Hide all”. We're going to create a trigger for that, it's going to be a hotkey, and will type in Control+Option+Command+H, and now I've made a trigger. So I've hit Control+Command+Option+H, something needs to happen. In this case, I'm want to hide all the open windows. So now I'm going to click “new action”. And it's going to open up this list of actions. And you can get lost in this list. But we're not going to do that. We're gonna do a search, just type “Hide”. And you can see there's a command for “hide all” applications. I'll double click it. And it's just been added. There's some complications here. If you want to add some to an excluded application list, we're not going to do any of that stuff. We've just created a simple action that you hit Control+Command+Option+H, it hides all applications. Now let me mess up my desktop and show it to you in action.

Okay, now I've a messy desktop, look at the bunch of apps here. Let's say the day’s [Indian] and I want to just hide them all and leave it clean. I'm going to hold Control+Option+Command+H. And just like that it's clean.

This is a really simple example. We're going to get to stuff much more complex as we go through the course. But I bet you can already see how useful Keyboard Maestro can be.

Downloadable Keyboard Maestro Script: