All my palettes went away! #$%! (But I eventually got them back)

@peternlewis I know this is going to be a frustrating post to read, because I can’t tell you how it happened, nor can I really tell you with absolute certainty how I fixed it. But I’ll tell you what I remember:

Don’t know if this is related, but Chrome wouldn’t shut down. After some reboots, I uninstalled Chrome. (I reinstalled it after I fixed by palette issue, below.)

Somewhere during this debacle, before I uninstalled Chrome, suddenly none of my macro palettes would show. I even ran ComplexPoint’s plugin to find the palette positions, and it couldn’t find any of them, so I doubt they were “off the screen” or something like that.

As I said, I tried everything I could think of. Toggling them using a myriad of methods, using “show under mouse”, etc. They just wouldn’t show up.

Eventually, I restored my KM user preferences and Application Support files. Still nothing… but I went through the steps to show and hide them, and suddenly they were back! I had to force each separate macro palette to be visible, but they all came back.

So everything’s OK now, but I haven’t the faintest idea of what happened.

If this ever happens in the future, what do you need from me before I try to fix it? I figure you’ll want some files, logs, etc. Just let me know.

Sorry I don’t know more than this. I’m a crappy user, I know. :stuck_out_tongue:

PS: Thank God I started using Time Machine to do hourly backups!

If the Keyboard Maestro Engine itself is “Hidden”, that can stop all your palettes from appearing. This was more a problem in the past because people would check the “Hide” option in the Login Items, but modern versions of Keyboard Maestro all defend against this and if you turn on the Hide flag, Keyboard Maestro will turn it back off. But it’s possible it got turned on and couldn’t or wasn’t turned off again before the reboot. Or it’s possible the Keyboard Maestro Engine was hidden by some other means.

Relaunching the Keyboard Maestro Engine would generally fix this though.

But frankly, who knows what was going on on your Mac as it sounds like multiple things were misbehaving.

Very true.