When I bring up a conflict palette, it seems to somewhat arbitrarily choose which characters differentiate one macro from another. (I’m sure there’s an algorithm at work, but the pattern of its operation eludes me.)
Is there any way to assign a conflict-palette keyboard shortcut, or otherwise clue KM in as to what characters should be looked at to differentiate it?
The issue I’m having is that some of my conflict palettes are quite large, so I end up filtering down macros by words like “and”, where typing “an” will trigger one, and “ad” will trigger another. Very unintuitive.
Alternately, and this is probably a feature request, it would be nice if the palette was just prefixed with the number of the item in the list so that I could trigger it by number. (Yes, I could do this by hand, but then I’m doing a LOT of updating when stuff changes.)
The algorithm is very simple - it finds the prefix that all the macros share, ignores that and uses the next letter.
If the letter you press has more than one macro, then the palette is filtered to those matching the prefix and that letter, and then the process is repeated.
So if “and” is part of your letters, then you would have to have macros that look like:
X and Y
X Z
Hopefully with the process in mind, you can choose your macro names appropriately to get a good result.
Currently there is no way to tell Keyboard Maestro which characters to use, and it is hard to imagine a scenario where you could specify them.
And number keys do work if they are not being used as part of the macro name. They are not shown in the palette though.
There is a private preference that will have it use each letter in turn rather than ignoring a preference, so if your macros were:
Purple
Puce
Pink
You would trigger them by typing:
pur
puc
pi
respectively.
I don’t really recommend it, but it is an option currently.