Feat: Quick access to edit the macro that spawned some type of UI

[Nige_S]

@Nige_S

Although you might be able to write a macro that OCRed the frontmost prompt and opened the link...

So I had a spare 5 minutes...

If you can go to the bother of adding %ExecutingMacroUUID% to your dialogs:

...so you get

...then this macro will OCR the frontmost macro dialog (and not the rest of your screen(s)), extract the UUID, and open the macro in KM ready for editing:

Edit Macro from Front Dialog UUID.kmmacros (5.2 KB)

Image

[ar-km]

You guys are awesome. Thanks for all of the time and clever ideas.

@Nige_S

Problem is that it isn't a general solution -- you can't add a button to the "Alert" dialog, for example.

Agreed.

@Nige_S

You could include link to your macro in every dialog, eg

Duh. Using the keyboardmaestro:// URL Scheme. That's what I was trying to think of before. I think most user created ways of implementing this would rely on this.

@Nige_S

...except that's fugly and isn't clickable (at least until we get Markdown in dialogs) -- it can't even be selected and used elsewhere.

Agreed.

@Nige_S

Another method, assuming that the dialog is synchronous and the macro is still running, would be to get all currently executing instances, get the macro name for each, maybe check those named macros for dialog actions, and offer a pick-list of matches to open in the Editor. The main problem is that you can't (AFAIK) go from instance UUID to macro UUID, you have to bounce through the macro name, which could cause issues if the name isn't unique...

Yeah. Also, this is getting rather elaborate.

Oh wait... I hear @Nr.5-need_input saying something

@Nr.5-need_input

Since I’ve solved this exact thing few months ago for my own - here is everything written down (dictated of course… )

[...]

But the above way shows the way I’ve solved your issue for myself some time ago and I’ve implemented this into quite a few Macros … maybe 200 or so … refer these 200 to my description above as Macro one … if nothing until now made sense to you - now it probably should …

What an interesting approach. I think I understand the logic of it but it will take me a while to fully wrap my mind around it.

Side note: It's nice to see that someone else was thinking along the same lines and not only took the time figure it out but also write it up. Thank you.

@Nr.5-need_input

not being able to write that by using my Hands or - the better - giving you a setup that shows everything with instructions on how to use is terrible but that’s my problem.

Wait. What!?! This is even more impressive. Thank you x2 !!

@Nige_S

...then this macro will OCR the frontmost macro dialog (and not the rest of your screen(s)), extract the UUID, and open the macro in KM ready for editing:

Amazing!

Even though, on its face, using OCR for something like this sounds nuts, it totally makes sense given the limitations you mentioned above. I also like how it will "fail gracefully" when the dialog has no UUID.

And very clever confining the OCR'ing to the dialogBounds.

TIL: [:xdigit:] in RegEx.

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Once again, thank you everyone for your ideas and time.

[Airy]

@Nige_S

Hmmm... @Airy -- that's your area of expertise, fancy a go?

I just realized that by turning off my email flag, apparently I don't get notifications when someone mentions my name like this in a thread. But I read a lot of threads and I found this reference independently. Let me read this thread and ponder it. It's quite flattering to get that comment from Nige.

[Airy]

@Nige_S

Hmmm... @Airy -- that's your area of expertise, fancy a go?

Here's my first go, which seems to work in my test... (of course, I may not understand the question.) What this does, if you add a trigger to it, is that it uses OCR to read all the text in the frontmost window, then extracts all the links, then lets the user choose which link to open in their default app for links.

OCR screen and Display Links Macro (v11.0.3)

OCR screen and Display Links.kmmacros (3.5 KB)

[ar-km]

I was thinking about creating a macro that used either the Executing Macro or Executing Instance token to reference the macro that spawned the User Input or Alert.

But that's also not possible for the same reason as:

@Nige_S

@kevinb

Something else that may be relevant and which I had forgotten till I stumbled upon it again just now is "Last Used" in the Keyboard Maestro Editor's menu.

And that bad news is that you can't (I don't think) macro this in KM -- because the last used macro will be the one you triggered to go to the last used macro... Unless you want to go spelunking in Engine.log, of course.

I know the manual way to deal with this would be to create a Go to: Macro with UI on-screen macro that has a bunch Open URL actions with kmtrigger://macro=UUID and accompanying if checks (or switch) to first see if those macros are currently executing.

But that's very... Manual

And even if it worked, there would still be downsides. Like: If different macro starts running after the one with the alert/user input, that one will open.

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I keep coming back to these two approaches:

1. A new token can be used to open the calling macro.

   For example: ExecutingMacroThatSpawnedThisUi (that is a horrible name) that would be used in conjunction with the Open URL action and kmtrigger://macro=UUID.

2. A new Go to macro ▶ menu item in the KM menu.

   Its contents would be a list of the currently running macros. So essentially a version of the Cancel menu that would go to the selected macro rather than cancelling it.

   And like I mentioned above, maybe it could be the alternate version of that Cancel menu, that appears when you hold down the option key.

   I'm not sure the best way to handle assigning a keyboard shortcut thought, since:

   • There can be more than one macro in the list.
   • You can't assign an OS hotkey since the name of the macro will not be stable.

   So maybe #1 (above) would also be beneficial?