Keyboard Maestro

July 8, 2016 by cryan.com

Last week I wrote about how awesome BetterTouchTool was. Well there was one thing missing - I wanted a way to run Unix shell commands from a key press. I wanted to have some Bash commands that I wanted executed when I clicked on the F19 key.

I discovered that there is another keyboard tool that bridges the "Unix Shell" gap - Keyboard Maestro by Stairways Software. This is far from a new tool on the market - it's been around for a long time.

Keyboard Maestro

With keyboard Maestro you can assign Unix commands to keys, something you can't do with BetterTouchTool. You can assign all sorts of actions to all your F keys, something that you can't do with TextExpander.

With Keyboard Maestro, I have now had a "random word" key. Anytime that I need a word, I simply press the "F 19" key. This makes testing so much easier, if I need a word, simply hit the F19 key.

Creating a "Random Key" Macro

Here's how to configure Keyboard Maestro so that you can have your own random key: (I assume that you downloaded the software and have it properly setup.)

1. Click Command - N to create a new Macro
2. Call it whatever you want, "Random Word" is a good choice.
3. Click the green plus icon to add a New Trigger, and select the 'Hot Key' Trigger
4. Type in any Key, F13 or F19 are good options, as well as the 'end' button.
5. Click on the green Plus icon next to the 'New Action'
6. With 'All Actions' selected in the Categories, search for 'Shell' and select the 'Execute a Shell Script'
7. Click on 'Display results in a window' and change it to 'type results'
8. Paste the following text in the text area box:

#!/bin/bash
WORDFILE=/usr/share/dict/words
RANDOM=$$;
lines=$(cat $WORDFILE | wc -l);
rnum=$((RANDOM*RANDOM%$lines+1));
sed -n "$rnum p" $WORDFILE | perl -pe 'chomp'

9. Click Edit
10. Try it out! You'll need to have the cursor in a text field, Why not try the browser search.