Automated Copyediting on the Mac: Verifying URLs with Keyboard Maestro

No matter what, verifying URLs in a document is tedious work, but it's far worse with a mouse, so I use Keyboard Maestro to speed up the process, and my hands never have to leave my keyboard.

My hot key combination for launching the Keyboard Maestro macro is the ungainly Control+Option+Command+Shift+U. Thankfully I'm able to invoke this wretched combination with my Caps Lock key by pressing Caps+U, which is achieved by remapping Caps Lock via Karabiner-Elements as described here.

When I press Caps+U, the macro performs the following steps:

1. Copy the selected text (the URL in this case) to the clipboard.
2. Bring the front window of Safari to the front.
3. Open the URL in Safari. 
4. Wait for Safari to finish loading to provide (hopefully) enough time for visual confirmation of the expected result.
5. Switch back to the Microsoft Word document.

And in Keyboard Maestro, the macro looks like this:

​I do still have to select the entire URL manually since the addressing structure can vary so much (e.g., everything from usda.gov to fs.usda.gov/activity/alabama/recreation/camping-cabins/?recid=30079&actid=29 and, of course, worse), but this approach still speeds things up tremendously and greatly reduces repetitive stress.

If you have a method for selecting an entire URL at once—regardless of complexity—with a keyboard shortcut, I'd love to know about it.