Improved Keyboard Maestro Palettes

Using some simple emojis, icons, numbers, and spacing you can supercharge your Keyboard Maestro palettes.

It takes a little bit of time to get the spacing right, and it isn’t perfect, but these changes certainly make the palette more useful. Here’s the process.

Step 1 – Change the Sort Order of the Macros

Prepend “##)” to each macro. The number indicates the position. I like to give some breathing room between each “group”. In this example I ended up with this:

Step 2 – Add Icons

Use whatever tool/service/files you want for your icon images. I like using https://fonts.google.com/icons. I use the following steps:

1. Search for your first icon
2. Click it
3. Set the color (something that will look good on the dark palette background)
4. Set the size to 256
5. Click the PNG download button
6. Repeat for each icon

Once you have all the icons, for each macro:

1. Open the PNG file in Preview (double click the file in Finder)
2. Select All (⌘A)
3. Copy (⌘C)
4. Click the placeholder icon on the KM macro
5. Paste (⌘V)

Step 3 – Add Spaces and Emojis

I like to add spaces between the parts of the macro names. This makes things look more polished. You cannot get it perfect with a non-monospaced font, so this might not be for everyone. Also note that there’s an option in the Palette Style settings (see below) to show the trigger key (if you don’t want to include in your macro titles).

Keyboard Maestro supports emojis in the macro names, which can add more helpful visual cues to your palette. Use the Mac emoji picker via CTRL + ⌘ + SPACE or Fn + e.

Here’s the final result (showing how each item has whatever number of spaces are needed to make it look good):

Final Configuration

Taking it Further

In this tutorial, I’ve barely scratched the surface on the customizations you can do to palettes.

There are all sorts of built-in options to customize the look and feel, via the Palette Style settings: