Keyboard Maestro alternative: a visual radial launcher for macros

Keyboard Maestro is one of the most respected pieces of software on the Mac. It has been maintained since 2003, the documentation is thorough, and the people who use it well can do things that genuinely look like magic — conditional window layouts, triggered text expansions, app-state-aware macros, shell hybrids, the lot.

It is also, if we are being honest, a scripting environment with a GUI stapled on. And most KM users I know installed it, built four or five macros, and have never touched the rest of the feature surface. Not because the rest is bad — it is exceptional — but because the shape of their actual need is "one gesture, one macro," and KM is built to do much more than that.

This post is for the second group. If you are the first group — if you have twenty conditional macros with branching logic and window-state triggers — stay on Keyboard Maestro. It is the right tool for your job. The rest of this is for people who want to run a handful of common macros fast and have never found the UI for that simple.

What KM is actually for

Keyboard Maestro excels at three things no radial menu will ever do:

• Conditional macros. If the frontmost app is Safari and the URL contains "github.com," press this shortcut; otherwise, press that one. KM handles this natively.
• Multi-step automation with state. Open a window, wait for it to load, click a specific pixel, type a string, press Return, wait for the response, parse it, act accordingly.
• Trigger types that are not "the user asked for it." When a file is added to a folder. When a network changes. When an app launches. When the system wakes.

If any of those is your use case, close this tab and keep using KM. Seriously.

Where KM becomes overkill

The other group of KM users has macros that look like this:

• "Start my focus session" — runs a script, opens one app, sets DND.
• "Open meeting tools" — opens Zoom and Slack.
• "Clean up Desktop" — moves files into a folder.
• "Toggle Do Not Disturb."
• "Insert my email signature."

These are not conditional. They are not multi-step state machines. They are "do this specific sequence when I ask." KM can absolutely run them, but the hotkeys are a problem. You end up with ⌃⌥⇧F7, ⌃⌥⇧F8, ⌃⌥⇧F9, and within two weeks you cannot remember which is which.

This is the exact problem a radial menu solves. One trigger opens a visual menu. You flick in a direction. The macro runs. You do not memorize any of them.

Side by side

The cleaner pairing: Swik + Shortcuts.app

Most of what "light" KM users actually build can be recreated in Apple's Shortcuts.app, which has been part of macOS since Monterey and has quietly become very capable. Shortcuts handles the macro logic; Swik handles the trigger surface.

In Swik, a wedge can be set to Run Shortcut and takes the name of any shortcut from Shortcuts.app. Under the hood it calls shortcuts run "Your Shortcut Name", which is how the rest of macOS does it too. There is no glue script to maintain, no Lua to learn, no action editor to fight.

A realistic migration for a "five macros" KM user:

1. In Shortcuts.app, rebuild each macro as a shortcut. Most translate directly — "open app" becomes "Open App," shell calls become "Run Shell Script."
2. In Swik, create a wedge for each one. Set the action to "Run Shortcut" and type the shortcut's exact name.
3. Hold the trigger, flick toward the macro, release. Done.

If you have twelve of them, group them into sub-menus — one parent wedge for "Meetings," one for "Writing," one for "Home." Each opens a secondary ring with four or five related macros. You reach any of them in two flicks.

There is a longer walkthrough of this pattern in the Shortcuts integration guide.

The hotkey exhaustion problem

This is the single most common reason KM users end up looking for a radial menu.

Hotkeys do not scale. After about eight global hotkeys your hand starts fumbling them, and by twelve you are spending thirty seconds recovering from hitting the wrong one. The combinations become absurd — you end up at ⌃⌥⇧⌘F because everything else is taken — and your muscle memory cannot keep up.

A radial menu pays one hotkey to get out of that problem forever. You bind the trigger to something cheap like a mouse side button or ⌥Space. Every macro inside the menu is addressed by direction, not by key combination. Adding the thirteenth macro costs you zero new hotkeys.

When Keyboard Maestro is the right call

Stay on KM if:

• Your macros include conditional logic that branches on app state, window state, clipboard contents, or time.
• You have file-system-watcher triggers or network-change triggers you rely on.
• You have macros that do multi-step UI automation — click this pixel, wait for this window, type into this field.
• You have been using KM for years and your library is large. The cost of migrating is higher than the ergonomic benefit of a radial menu.
• You genuinely enjoy the scripting environment. Some people do, and that is a real form of leverage.

In all these cases KM is doing something a radial menu cannot replace. Do not fight that.

When a radial launcher wins

Consider the Swik + Shortcuts.app pairing if:

• You have under thirty macros and most are linear — no conditionals, no loops.
• You have run out of hotkey combinations and your fingers are fighting you.
• You want new macros to be discoverable visually for the first week instead of memorized cold.
• You installed KM, built five macros, and never touched the rest.
• You prefer a one-time $9 for the trigger surface, paired with Shortcuts.app which ships free with macOS.

KM is one of the great Mac apps. It is not the only macro trigger on the market, and for many users it is more than they need. If that is you, the split is: Shortcuts.app for the macro, Swik for the gesture.