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Keyboard Maestro

Create an iTunes song info window using Keyboard Maestro

For those who aren't aware, Keyboard Maestro is a macro-creation tool, designed to help you automate routine tasks. But its powers let you do some really cool stuff, not all of which could be classified as automation. Such is the case with this project: Creating an iTunes song info pop-up window.

There are lots of apps out there—including Many Tricks own Butler—that can do this for you, and my Keyboard Maestro version is worse than most of those in many respects. However, I wanted to teach myself more about Keyboard Maestro, and this seemed like a good project with which to do so.

I use Buter's iTunes pop-up info window, which looks like this:

I wasn't really interested in the rating or volume controls (though they should be doable), but I wanted to see if I could get the album art and song info in a window via Keyboard Maestro. After some struggles, here's what I came up with in Keyboard Maestro:

My window is larger by design, so I can have somewhat more visible album art (aging eyes). And I can't decide on a background color or gradient, so it keeps changing—this was the look when I snapped the screenshot, but it's since changed again.

Read on if you'd like to know more about Keyboard Maestro, and how I used it to create this iTunes info window. (Note that this write-up assume some familiarity with Keyboard Maestro, though I try to explain each step in the process.)

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Remap non-modifiable keyboard shortcuts in any app

Ever run into a program that has some pre-defined keyboard shortcuts you don't like? In most cases, they're associated with a menu item, which means you can use macOS' built-in keyboard shortcuts function to fix them. (In System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.)

But what if the shortcut isn't associated with any menu item? Such is the case in Excel 365, which replaced a couple easy-to-type shortcuts (⌃I and ⌃K for inserting and deleting rows and columns) with much harder to type versions: ⇧⌃= and ⌃-. If there's no corresponding entry in the app's menus, it seems impossible to remap the shortcuts—unless the app itself offers that feature, which Excel did in prior versions.

The good news is that it is possible to remap any keyboard shortcut in any app, as long as you're willing to add one more program to the mix: Some sort of macro app. My example uses Keyboard Maestro, but any app that can send a key sequence in response to another key sequence will do the trick.

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Quickly expand compressed files in Finder

In this post, I lamented on the incredible slowdown seen when expanding many compressed files in Finder. To save a trip back to that article, here's the tldr; version:

Expand 24 .gz filesFinder:
12.8 seconds		Terminal:
.013 seconds		Terminal is 984.6x faster than Finder

With a bit of work, though, you can harness the power of Unix in Finder, and get both the GUI and the speed when expanding files. There are many ways to do this, including third-party apps such as The Unarchiver. You could also write an Automator Service to do the work for you. But I chose to write a Keyboard Maestro macro, because I could make the macro a menu bar option that only shows when Finder is frontmost:

As seen, I actually have two expanders, one that expands just the Apple sales reports mentioned in my original post, and the other that will handle any mix of compressed files. (Yes, the 'all files' macro could also handle the Apple sales reports, but because of how it has to run for multiple file types, it's marginally slower than the dedicated macro.)

These macros both work in the same way—they call on Unix apps to do the expansion, bypassing Apple's slow GUI expander (which is called Archive Utility). If you're curious how they work, and/or would like to download them for your own use, keep reading.

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