Home and End Button in Safari

Questions & Suggestions
1

My Mac mini is connected to a full mechanical keyboard such as there's a Home and End key.

I created two Global Macro when pressing Home/End to go beginning and end of of the line.

However, in Safari, I want Home to behave differently e.g. going to Top and Bottom of page. No problem, I created macros too.

I have two problems:

  1. In Safari, when pressing Home, a conflict palette appear. Ok, I can live with this though it is an inconvenience.

  2. If I am using Safari to edit text e.g. Gmail or Discourse forum such as this, how can I tell the macro to behave differently on the same app but different context/use case?

2

If I understand correctly, you want to find out if the cursor is in a text field or not, and then have your macro do the right thing for the situation.

In that case, you could test for a text field (area) with an AppleScript:

tell application "System Events"
	set frontApp to name of first process whose frontmost is true
	tell application process frontApp
		set theRole to role of value of attribute "AXFocusedUIElement"
		return theRole = "AXTextArea"
	end tell
end tell

Here an example macro:

Test for Text Area.kmmacros (4.6 KB)

image
image1218×1868 245 KB

This seems to work in most applications, though in Safari it is pretty slow, at least for me.

If you need it only for Safari, I imagine there are better solutions with JavaScript.

Edit/PS:

Yes, way better for Safari with a JS condition:

document.activeElement.type

Test for Text Area in Web Browser.kmmacros (4.4 KB)

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image1218×1708 194 KB

2 Likes
3

Thanks. You gave me a good idea. Instead of having two macros and therefore needing a conflict palette, I can use your code to check if I’m in edit mode. If yes, then Home goes to beginning of line. Otherwise, it jumps to top of window. Elegant. Thank you!

4

The Apple Script works well for me. I appreciate it very much. But, it’s also slow in Drafts and TextEdit so I’m wondering if there’s another option to this. But it does it job well albeit a second delay.

5

For web browsers, you should definitely use the JavaScript variant I posted.

The AppleScript UI script ("tell application "System Events"… etc.") is a "catch all" approach that should work for most/many applications even if they don't have their own AppleScript dictionary.

If an application comes with a dedicated AppleScript dictionary (e.g. TextEdit; for Drafts, I don't know), it's always better to use that instead of generic UI scripting. Of course, this means that you have to make a special macro for that application (or branch with conditionals within the macro).

1 Like
6

Yeah, I figure that since I spent more time in apps like Drafts and TextEdit, I first check whether Safari is the front most app. If it is, then only check if it's Text Area. That helps tremendously!

Edit: in case anyone is interested, here's the macro, thanks 100% to @Tom

Home Key.kmmacros (7.5 KB)

image

1 Like