Keyboard Maestro Releases Version 9, with Dark Mode, JSON, OCR, and More

Keyboard Maestro by Stairways Software is a powerful automation program which allows you to create your own macros that automate certain actions on your Mac. With Keyboard Maestro (and a little bit of practice), you can use your Mac to automate virtually anything.

Keyboard Maestro has been an essential Mac app for me for years. Whenever I use a Mac that doesn’t have my Keyboard Maestro macros installed, it feels broken to me. Over the years my use of Keyboard Maestro has expanded, as the application keeps getting more useful by expanding the palette of automation options that it gives you and now offers hundreds of actions to choose from. Version 9 continues this trend and includes a ton of updates, including Dark Mode, JSON, and OCR.

The Dark Mode in Keyboard Maestro looks really good. Keyboard Maestro has never been the type of program that you keep open in a window all the time, so it wasn’t necessarily screaming for a dark mode. However, Keyboard Maestro’s dark mode does look nice and makes managing macros a little bit easier on the eyes.

You can also now have multiple Keyboard Maestro windows open at once. This is handy when you want to look at a macro (like this one by Rose) while building your own version in a separate window.

Version 9 also adds the ability to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to either images or directly to your screen, and extensive support for JSON across a range of actions, functions and tokens.

There’s a ton of other stuff that is new in version 9, like improved Regex support, the ability to control System Dark Mode settings, and more. You can see the full list of what’s new here. And if you want a great guide to mastering Keyboard Maestro, we highly recommend MacSparky’s Keyboard Maestro Field Guide.

Keyboard Maestro 9 is available for a one-time purchase of $36. If you are upgrading from version 8 you can do so for $18 for a limited time, and you can upgrade from any version for $25. And if you purchased Keyboard Maestro after February 1st of this year, you get an upgrade to version 9 for free.