Feature Request: Folders Within Folders (Or, Groups Within Groups)

Questions & Suggestions
1

Hi Peter and team! Huge KM fan, congrats on making a truly transformative application. I’ve found myself using two things a lot, which are quite useful together, leading to a suggestion/feature request for your consideration in future KM versions. The two things I refer to are:

  1. Groups within the Keyboard Maestro Editor. Represented visually in the UI as folders obviously, but I see that they are called Groups

  2. Using Status Menu triggers to initiate macros

As you know, the Status Menu triggers in the KM Menu Bar icon are sorted by Group/Folder that they appear in. My groups are something like:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
etc.

But, I’d love the ability to put groups within those groups. So like:

Monday -> Sales
-> Accounting
-> Cleanup
Tuesday -> Sales
-> Accounting
-> Cleanup
etc

I can create a Group/Folder for every combination of day & task, but then the Status Menu Bar icon menu gets really long. I thought the ability to have folders within folders (or groups within groups) would clean up the Status Menu by enabling contextual submenus to come up as I mouseover into an area in the Status Menu. So rolling over Monday would show Sales, Accounting, Cleanup, etc.

If there’s already a way to tighten up / organize the Status Menu that I’m missing, please let me know.

Thanks for making a great Mac app!

2

Folders within Groups, or Groups within Folders, or Nested Folders/Groups is an occasionally asked for feature.

Obviously for most users, with even a hundred macros, this is overkill, so it is a feature largely appropriate more to serious power users than general Keyboard Maestro users (for myself, even with 70 groups and 1000 macros, I can't remember ever wishing for another level of groups, although the group list is a little longer than practical).

The problem with the concept is largely the extra UI and cognitive complexity it entails. Currently Macro Groups have a very clear purpose centred around macro activation. Adding another level (or levels) complicates that concept dramatically. Does each level control activation. Is activation some sort of "and" condition of all the parent macro groups? Etc. Its not that it couldn't be made to make sense, but it is a lot of complexity.

In any event, I have no plans for adding multiple levels of groups for Keyboard Maestro 8, so it's not a solution that will help you any time in the next several years.

However, there are a couple things that might help you.

First, there is the option to have the status menu show the macros hierarchically instead of grouped.

20170215-103658.png726×572 83.7 KB

This shows each group as a submenu in the status menu. This may work better if you have a large number of status menu triggered macros.

The second thing depends on your use. Do you use only Monday macros on Monday, is that the idea? if so, you could disable the non-Monday macro groups first thing Monday morning and then the same on Tuesday etc.

So you could have your groups

  • Monday Sales
  • Monday Accounting
  • Monday Cleanup
  • Tuesday Sales
    …

And have a macro that runs first thing each morning (perhaps time triggered, or wake triggered with a control to run only once a day) to do something like:

  • If text %ICUDateTime%EEE% is Mon
    • Enable Macro Group "Monday Sales"
    • Enable Macro Group "Monday Accounting"
    • Enable Macro Group "Monday Cleanup"
  • else
    • Disable Macro Group "Monday Sales"
    • Disable Macro Group "Monday Accounting"
    • Disable Macro Group "Monday Cleanup"
  • If text %ICUDateTime%EEE% is Tue
    • Enable Macro Group "Tuesday Sales"
      …

Perhaps one or other of those techniques would help.

1 Like
3

Great hints - thanks Peter! I wasn’t aware of the Hierarchical view, that definitely helps a lot now… and, the rest of your post had some excellent ideas if things eventually get unwieldy with the hierarchical view. Thanks again!

4

Tags: %Editor, %sub-folders, %“sub folders”, %subfolders

5

I have a suggestion for organizing macros. I would prefer to have Group subfolders as well. However, I realized that, since KM now allows executable trigger files to be exported, that I can export my most used macros as trigger files and organize them any way I like, in any folder and subfolders I like, right there within the finder, and then even search them with Spotlight. Just a suggestion.

1 Like