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Application Specific Keystrokes
Quickly Hide Applications Using Corners
Building a Temporary Menu
Hot Corners Under Butler
Simple Keyboarding Shortcuts
Who Needs Help?
Wrap-Around Code

Application Specific Keystrokes

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Keystrokes are a very powerful feature of Butler. With them you can record a set of key presses, including combinations, and insert pauses where required. You then assign hot keys to play back the keystrokes.

The hot key configuration has the option of having the hot key not work with certain applications, or only work with certain applications. This means that—for example—when using Safari, Butler can take over the whole numeric keypad, turning it into a control panel for the browser.

With this control panel you can now have individual keys emulating key combinations, or even sequences of key combinations. Here's how my keypad is set up for Safari:

  • The Zero key cycles through open Safari windows
  • The Period key does an Open Location (Cmd-L) command
  • The 1 key toggles the status bar
  • The 2 key reduces the text size
  • The 3 key enlarges the text size
  • The 4 key opens a new window and does an Open Location
  • The 5 key goes back a page
  • The 6 key goes forward a page
  • 7, 8 and 9 keys paste selected text into either WriteRoom, TextEdit or Tofu
  • The Enter key toggles the Bookmarks bar
  • The + key toggles the Address Bar
  • The - key toggles both bars on or off

Quickly Hide Applications Using Corners

You may have several applications running at the same time—their various windows cluttering up your display. If you just want to concentrate on the front-most application you can press the key combination: Opt-Cmd-H and the others will vanish. They are still running, only hidden.

To hide them using only the mouse you can set up a Butler action like the one below. Here I've created a new Smart Item: Keystroke called "Hide Others" and the keystroke is Opt-Cmd-H.

I then chose right-clicking in the bottom-left corner as the trigger.

Building a Temporary Menu

From the image below, you can see that I have made a new Container called "Mac Site," and within that container there are some custom pasteboards. The container is within the Invisible Items section so it doesn't clutter any existing menus. I've used the "/" key on the numeric keypad as the hot key because I never normally use that key.

The items in the container are blocks of HTML code that I'm likely to re-use; when I'm working on a page I put the insertion point where I want the code to go and press "/" to see the pop-up menu below. Then I choose the item and it's inserted.


Hot Corners

OSX uses hot corners for controlling Exposé out of the box; using the mouse, you push the pointer hard into a screen corner to show all windows, or the desktop, or whatever.

I use buttons in my multi-function mouse to perform these actions.

Butler can also use the corners of the screen. Here's how I take advantage of it:

  • Top Left Corner:
    Left click to simply close an app
    Right click to simply close a window

  • Bottom Left Corner:
    Left click to close an app and save it
    Right click to close a window and save it

  • Bottom Right Corner:
    Left click to close an app and not save it
    Right click to close a window and not save it

So, when I'm mousing rather than keyboarding and I want to close a document I take a half-second to decide which corner to click, rather than hit the close button or close the app via the menu, and then have to confirm whether to save changes etc.

Here you can see that I've setup a keystrokes shortcut in Butler's configuration window to Close and Kill an app using left-click in the bottom-right hot corner; the keystrokes that are produced are: Command-Q and then a short pause to wait for the save dialogue, then Space to choose the Don't Save option.

But what about the top-right corner? There I left-click for Butler Configuration and right-click for the list of system preferences.

Simple Keyboarding Shortcuts

These are shortcuts for phrases that I might need to type several times a day; Under the Invisible Items section I add Custom Pasteboard Smart Items.

As an example: I often need to type "http://www." (and who doesn't?) so I create a shortcut by pasting "http://www." into the content panel of Butler's configuration screen and give it a shortcut; in this case: Control-H.


Who Needs Help?

In Safari, the the address bar; the Google bar; and the toolbar buttons can be hidden using a three-key combination. I find this just a little bit cumbersome. Then I noticed there's a Help key and realized that I had never-once used it, so in Butler I made a new keyboard shortcut that's invoked by the Help key.

Now it's one tap to go from this...

To this...

And back again. I really like having the bar hidden; a nice feature of Safari is that when it's hidden and you invoke text entry in the address bar with Command-L, the bar appears, and then disappears again when you press Enter.

See just how un-cluttered Safari can look

Wrap-Around Code

The Keystrokes Smart Item can be utilized as a simple macro. In the example below I have entered the keystrokes that would cut the selected text, enter the opening code, paste back the text, and then enter the closing code.

So, I might write a paragraph of text and then choose to select the text I want blockquoted and press Control-Command-B to have that text wrapped by the code.

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