@peternlewis Peter - I just had a major epiphany: If I could copy the selected action(s), manipulate them, then paste them back in replacing the selected actions, the things I could do are so exciting, I can hardly think straight.
Obviously I can do the first 2 parts. It’s the Paste & Replace that I need. I can’t just delete the selected actions and paste in new ones, because the insertion point can change, depending on nesting and such.
Just one example: Search & Replace. I could write a macro that would allow you to search the selected actions for, say, a variable name, and replace it with something else.
Of course, there’s not a real way to select specific actions, so it would be a “replace all”, but still.
If there’s any way to implement this one soon, I’d be in heaven. And hopefully soon after, others would join me.
No, because the pasted action(s) don’t always go back in the same place. It’s the same issue you have with your “Group” macro. Sometimes the pasted action(s) go above (or below, I can’t remember) where they should.
If my recommendation is implemented, your issues with your “Group” macro can go away with a minor tweak to the macro, and I can start implementing all sorts of fun stuff.
I’d like to bring this up again. I wish you’d consider changing the priority for this.
First off, to me, it doesn’t seem like this would be all that difficult to implement.
Secondly, the more I write the kinds of helper macros I’ve been writing, the more I can see uses for it. If I could reliably copy selected action(s), modify them, and replace them, the list of helper macros I could write starts to boggle my mind.
I keep thinking of uses, but unfortunately I don’t remember to write them down. But you know the kinds of helper macros I’ve been creating, so you know I’m not just blowing smoke here.
Off the top of my head, one example would be to provide Spotlight search dialogs for specifying/changing actions like “Execute a Macro”, “Enable/Disable Macro/Groups”, etc.
Another couple of ideas, and I realize this is more blue-sky, but I think it has potential:
I (we) could write popup “editors” for the Parameters for “Execute a Macro” actions. This would allow us to provide a dialog to enter/edit multiple parameters for a macro, in nice, separate edit controls, then encode them to a format the parameter can use - perhaps separated by “|”, or whatever.
I might be able to write a search-and-replace feature for selected actions, so you can change variable names, for example.
Again, I can’t really articulate this very well. But I hope you can see what I’m saying. If this really is a reasonably easy thing to implement, then I think it would be well worth your time.
