I like to give macros icons. When I use Characters from the Icon Chooser I often adjust the position, size, and color of the character. However, if I later return to that icon to make changes in one or more of those I must start from the beginning — choosing the character and adjusting the size, height, and color. This is not only tedious, but very error-prone (as far as small-level differences).
I would like a way to get the macro’s current icon into the Icon Chooser with its character, color, size, and position the way I originally had it. Icon Copy and Paste is irrelevant here. Since double-clicking a macro icon doesn’t do anything, I propose that it be used for this purpose.
Double-clicking an icon that came from the Internal or Applications section would, I suppose, do nothing, but in the case of single-color internal icons it could also offer those for coloring.
When you open the Icon Chooser, it sets its values based on the selected icon well, if any.
So, with the icon well selected, and the Icon Chooser showing another icon, simply press Command-3 twice to close and open it, and it will update to the selected icon well, no need to reconfigure it from scratch.
It is done this way to allow you to take the settings to another icon well if desired, so with the Icon Chooser open and showing values already, clicking on a new icon well does not destroy the information - neither the icon in the well, nor the icon in the Icon Chooser. Close and reopen the Icon Chooser to reload it from the well, or make a change to set the icon in the well.
I believe I had tried quitting and reopening the KM Editor and confirmed that the settings were as I left them, but I guess I must have had an icon selected when I tried that.
Not happening for me:
I select the icon well of a macro with a default icon.
I close the Icon Chooser.
I reopen the Icon Chooser.
The previously chosen colors, size, and position are still what they were when I last changed them for another icon
The same is true if I select a well with the default icon, quit, and restart KM.
I have rechecked this in several ways a few times, so I think I’ve gone past my usual carelessness.]
OK, that works. Those steps did not occur to me; I think it is too subtle, and I wonder how many people will have discovered this.
I still can't figure out how to start with all icon attributes cleared (colors, shape, size, position and selected character). The shape and character don't really need to be reset, but the others do. Well, maybe the colors don't — I can manually set the background to white and the foreground to black, though that is slightly irritating. So basically I just don't know how to return to the default size and position.
There is no concept of "cleared". They have to be set to something, and some default that I configured is no better than whatever you last used.
So the settings will never be set back to the defaults you get when you first launched Keyboard Maestro. Not unless you delete the relevant preferences from the prefs file.
OK. The problem with this, though, is that I want to get back to the default size and position, not just adjust those by eye. And I believe that on principle anything that can be set should be able to be cleared. But now that I understand how this all works, I can deal with it all the way it is. Thanks.
I’m not sure if this was covered already, nor do I know if this will be helpful, however: When you select the icon in the KM Editor, you can press the Delete key and it will wipe out the icon, and have it be whatever the default is.
You can see for yourself that the icon is deleted. Export the macro to disk, and open the file in a text editor. Look for “CustomIconData”. If you see something like this:
Not what I wanted. I wanted to reset the attributes in the Character pane of the Icon Chooser. Character icons of macros have six attributes:
Character chosen
One of three shapes
Background color
Foreground color
Size
Position (horizontally and vertically)
After mucking around with one icon I want to create another icon (typically for a macro that has the default icon) and start fresh, with all of those attributes the way they were the first time I used the Character pane.
Since there are only three shapes, that attribute doesn't really matter. Similarly, it's easy enough (though slightly irritating) to select black for the foreground and white for the background. And presumably I would be about to select a character anyway, otherwise why would I be in the Character pane.
That leaves size, vertical position, and horizontal position. What @peternlewis is saying is that there is no formal notion of "default" for these attributes. As I see it there are de facto defaults — the values these attributes have the first time you create a character icon — but there is no way to get back to those values. True, if you are going around adjusting size and position you might not care about the original settings anyway, especially if you are working on a set of related macros where you do often want to keep the settings constant. But still. So that's where things are left — no way to "reset" the size and position character icons to their "original" values.
I didn't mean to be complaining about the current implementation, nor do I want this post to be taken as being critical. I was just perplexed by the details of the Character pane of the Icon Chooser when I went to use it in a different context than my normal usage. @peternlewis's comments on this page and on messages to me explains the behavior of the Character pane completely.
This is probably off-topic, but probably not worth a separate post, so I didn't know what to do: speaking of cleared, it would be lovely to have the choice of "transparent" for the background and foreground colors. I end up going out of KM to create icons because I often want them to have transparent foregrounds or backgrounds. (Well, normally backgrounds anyway.) This is so the background doesn't show up in the icons when the macros are on a palette.
The background can be set to fully transparent in the Icon Chooser.
Note that icon size in your macro file of an icon created with the Icon Chooser will be trivially small (a dozen bytes). The icon created by any other means (including copy & paste to another icon for example) will be significantly larger.
Significantly, in fact. When I copy/paste this icon (an arrow plus some color info, =77 bytes)…
… in KM Editor to another macro I get 13222 bytes of image data. That’s 186× the original size.
That means, to properly copy an icon from one macro to another I have to export the macros and copy/paste the IconData string between the .kmmacros plist files.
