Hi all — I’m new to Keyboard Maestro and really impressed by what it can do, but I’m struggling to debug my macros effectively.
I’ve built a fairly long macro that repeats a series of steps with pauses and conditional logic. It mostly works, but occasionally something fails silently — a keypress doesn’t seem to register, or a condition isn’t met — and I have no idea why.
The part I find hardest is that KM doesn’t show what it’s doing as it runs. I’ve tried using “Display Text Briefly” and adding pauses, but that’s not reliable enough when things go wrong. In fact right now it doesn’t even display. The interface also feels quite overwhelming at times, and I find the online documentation a bit tricky to navigate when I just want to solve a specific issue.
So I’d really appreciate any advice on:
• How to see what KM is doing while a macro is running
• How to log each step or failure to a file or console
• Any best practices for building macros that are easier to debug
• Tools or plugins that might help with testing or monitoring
Thanks in advance — any guidance would be hugely appreciated.
You haven't seen the KM Debugger yet? It may not be the world's greatest debugger, but it's really good! There are several different ways to turn it on or off. The way that I recommend is creating this macro and placing it in your permanent Global Macro Group group. (This is the first thing I do when I install Keyboard Maestro...)
You don't have to use the same hotkey that I do, but this will turn the debugger on and off and let you watch your macros or even step through your macros line by line. There's a button in the debugger that you should also press which turns on the display of variables (in the upper right corner.) The debugger looks like this when you turn it on:
If you are familiar with debuggers, you won't need me to explain all the features it has. When I first saw it, everything was clear to me without ever checking the documentation (although it was months before I noticed the Display Variables button.)
To be fair, there are ways to debug things without using the Debugger. I still use some of the techniques you refer to. One thing that I adore is using the Display Progress Bar action to display some data for debugging purposes. Here's what it looks like:
Another thing that might help you debug is the window that appears when you click on Window / Value Inspector in the KM Editor. It has a few extra features. But when you open that window, right click on it and make sure to enable "Show in Background":
Thank you. This is super helpful. Was able to see that the inputs were triggering but for some reason not registering in the app I’m working with. Frustratingly, it all worked fine yesterday.
