How to selectively run Keyboard Maestro macros in a synchronized environment

A challenged I’ve always faced in running Keyboard Maestro on multiple Macs, is the maintenance of macros that are common to all, i.e. when updating a macro on one machine (say, changing the API keys of a service I’m accessing), I have to remember to go make the same updates on the others.

Keyboard Maestro provides a solution to this problem, by allowing you to synchronize your macros across multiple machines. Their implementation, however, and in contrast to say, Hazel’s folder-scoped implementation, is all or nothing—meaning that you can’t have macros on one machine that don’t exist on the others. And that can become a problem, especially with macros that are scheduled to run periodically.

Keyboard Maestro provides two approaches to address this problem:

The first is the ability to, for any given group (folder) of macros, to click, “Disable on this Mac”.

Unfortunately, there’s a number of shortcomings to this option. For example, anytime you add a new group of macros to a given machine, you have to remember to potentially go around disabling them on the others.

The second approach, and better in my opinion, is to condition the execution of any macro on the UUID (universally unique ID) of the machine on which the macro is running. Here’s an example of how this works.

The first step is to maintain a macro that determines the UUID of the current machine, and defines a list of named UUIDs for machines you’ll later be referencing. I run the following macro daily, and whenever I add a new machine, I’ll add its UUID to the list of named machines by temporarily running the disabled action that copies the current machine’s UUID to the clipboard.

With this in place, I can now condition the execution of other macros by machine. The following is an example of a macro that runs daily, and quits FaceTime on my MacBook Pro.

If I wanted this macro to run on two machines, I could add a second UUID check, and change the condition to “any”.

While this approach requires additional effort in creating your macros, it provides big benefits in being able to manage from a single machine, the conditioned execution of macros on all of your machines.

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