Yesterday, when a built-in keyboard shortcut in macOS Messages did something else on my Mac, I realized I must have been triggering a KM macro that I'd forgotten about. So, in KM, I viewed all Macros, sorted by hot key, then looked for the hot key I had just used. But it was nowhere to be found in the list!
Long story short, I eventually stumbled upon the culprit: A macro to which I had assigned two, different hot keys. But when viewing All Macros, KM only displays the first of the two hot keys; it fails to display the second one—which was the one that was presenting the conflict.
Had I not been lucky enough to truly stumble upon the culprit, I can't think of any other way I could have determined which macro was using that hot key!
In summary:
When a macro has more than one hot key assigned to it, it appears that only the first hot key is displayed in the list of All Macros.
Suggestion: Please make All Macros show all hot keys—even if that means listing a macro twice (or more) in order to show each hot key. That would be better than the current behavior, which is to omit all but the first hot key, which leads to a lot of confusion.
There's a bunch of useful search qualifiers -- see the "Search Strings" Wiki page.
You could have viewed "All Macros" sorted by "Date Used" -- the culprit would have been near the top. Or check the last few entries of the KM Engine log (~/Library/Logs/Keyboard Maestro/Engine.log) to see recently executed macros and the triggers that fired them.
Unfortunately that lies somewhere between "very difficult" and "impossible" -- you can't show multiple entries for the same macro in the list, and making the "Trigger" column wide enough for potentially dozens of triggers would make it unusable.
You could solve the problem by only ever using one trigger for a macro, creating an alias of the macro whenever you wanted to add another trigger -- but that way lies madness!
Please don't list macros more than once. Maybe display their hotkeys in a single line, separated by something (spaces?). If the list is too long, it could be truncated and indicate the overflow with [...] or something like that.
Also, keep in mind that you can always search using the "hotkey:" keyword if you want to filter by hotkey, as Nige_S suggested.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try searching in the text field for hot keys.
That said, the fact that All Macros does not show all hot keys that are in use is still a bug.
No, the culprit would not have been near the top. I never said the macro was created recently. In fact it wasn't—which is why I had forgotten about it. It was created ages ago and had not been used in years.
You're mistaken. It's neither "very difficult," nor "impossible." (I have a background in coding.) Last I checked, computers do what we program them to do, not the other way around. I can think of numerous ways that KM could be programmed to show multiple hot keys. You might consider refraining from assuming that no one can do something, simply because you don't know how to do it.
Again, you're revealing a lack of imagination, while discounting the imagination and ingenuity of others. The column wouldn't have to be made wider at all. When sorting by hot key, the hot keys could be easily listed one above the other. A simplistic example:
My great Macro ⌘1 My great Macro ⌘2
(I italicized the second one to indicate that it's a duplicate macro for the purpose of showing more than one trigger. This is just one, possible solution. I can think of others, but the point is made.
Or KM's developer could solve the problem by making the sorted view show all hot keys.
I'm not sure what problem is solved by creating an alias.
You seem to be struggling with the notion that others might have good reasons for doing things the way that they do. The reason I have two triggers for one macro is that I use KM on multiple machines that have different purposes and quite a bit of unique software that's mutually exclusive to each machine. At the time, the preferred hot key worked on one machine, but on the other machine, that hot key conflicted with other software. I also have elaborate macros that trigger certain actions only if I'm on a certain machine. But this was a different scenario. So, the solution that worked for me is to have a different hot key assigned to that macro, for the (occasional) use on the second machine.
But this thread isn't about my workflow, although you seem intent upon making it so, as if I'm doing something wrong. This thread is about the fact that when hot keys are assigned to macros, the All Macros list—which purports to show all hot keys—does not show all hot keys.
That's a solvable problem, so I made a post about the issue.
Your suggestion to search by hot key was helpful. Thank you. The rest of your post was not helpful.
Neither did I. "Date Used" is last time it executed, not the last time was edited. And you were looking for something that had just executed.
An alias (which is really just a macro containing an "Execute a Macro" action pointed at the original) would sort off allow you to show the same macro twice in the list:
...so it's the closest you can get to what you want while still only having one underlying macro to edit when you want to make changes.
Not at all -- and I myself have many macros with multiple triggers, so I understand the problem. The search, the alias, the sort, and the Engine log are all ways I've used to get round it and I was hoping they'd help you too.
My comment that
...was in no way aimed at you or your workflows. It's because of KM's underlying data structure and the way that list is populated (the list items being the filtered contents of the selected Groups). I should have been clearer -- and I certainly should have included "probably" since I'm not the developer of KM! -- and for that I apologise.
It would be considered a "bug" if it were a deviation from the intended functionality or a failure to perform as designed. "Bad UX" would be a poor user experience caused by design flaws, even when the software works as intended.
In this case, I do NOT believe it's either. In fact, showing multiple entries for the same macro would likely result in a worse UX.
Criticizing others personally rather than engaging with their ideas isn't constructive, IMO. I’m all for debating ideas and different perspectives, but it helps to keep things focused on the topic rather than the person.
I have a bunch of macros with upwards of ten triggers. It would drive me insane seeing a duplicate macro for every trigger. Even just thinking about it is causing me some anxiety.
