Hey guys!
I'm new in the community and want to say thanks a lot at first to all the people who posted soo much great stuff here in this forum! I read a ton of material and read a lot already and I guess, now it's time to become a part of the community
One of the reasons is, I have a ton of questions and idea I want to share and hopefully some of you could mentorship me on my way from km-noob to km-pro
So long story short, here come my first question (or ideas, if this is NOT already possible in KM)
how can a sort my macro-groups better? (if you have any suggestions I would be amazed)
(my idea is, to sort it like list-view in finder, so that you can have top-level-folders without making the UI more complicated, what do you think about it guys?)
(as a short-time-Solution) I want to hide all the folders with macros only used by other macros so that my list is not that long (hopefully someone understands, why this is sometimes difficult to scroll through a folder-list of 100 folders just to find one specific (and yes, I really use KM a lot :D)) BUT of course I still wanna USE the macros in the hidden folders... is there a way? Would love suggestions.
I have a lot more ideas and questions, but maybe one after another
P.S.: Sorry for my english, I am not native, so please tell me, if something I wrote is not formulated good or it's not totally clear what I meant, I will appreciate it a lot
There's been talk about subfolders before and I think Peter is still against it.
There are lots of great Keyboard Maestro tools made by the community to help browse your macros though. My favorite one is:
Thanks a lot for your answer. I really appreciate that. I have to say, I do not understand why subfolders seems to be a problem, or how one could be against it, but of course browsing works well for me - so finding is not really the problem - it's more for my inner structure.
I try it this way now (only if anybody else could use the trick)...
I disable all the macro-groups which are not running in meta-structure (like e.g. 10 macro-groups with 100 macros in it which are all open specific folders + copy something in it (just an example)) and than click in "view" "hide disabled macrogroups" and than activate them in the "meta"-macro with the "enable-macro"-action just to disable the macro-groups afterwards again... maybe sound complicated, but makes group column waaay clearer and makes my structure more logic
It's not that Peter is specifically against the idea of nested group folders – it's just that implementing that feature would take a gruesome amount of time and effort.
It boils down to a cost/benefit equation, and at least for now the costs outweigh the benefits.
See specifically the Move Focus to Group List AppleScript.
Paste it into an Execute an AppleScript action in a macro, give the macro a keyboard shortcut, and you're one keystroke from being able to move the focus in the Keyboard Maestro Editor to the group list and type-selecting the group you want to get to.
actually I didn't try that, but I wouldn't help a lot becaus most of my groups starts with special charakters [, • etc.thanks any way
doesn't the view option "select groups column" do the trick or did I missed a detail?
(I guess I am not advanced enough in apple script to understand everything in the "Automating the Keyboard Maestro Editor"-Topic)
It allows searching by any character in the Group name, and using a list of favorite Groups to choose from. But then you can choose from all groups if you want.
@ccstone now I checked out the "go to group by name" I will use for other purposes now! It's great! Thanks a lot for the tipp! Thanks for the video link too - You have a great voice Christopher - you should speak for TV
@John, I hope you don't mind that I have revised your topic title to better reflect the question you have asked.
FROM: Use Hidden Macros
TO: How Can I better Organize, Manage, and Select my Macro Groups?
This will greatly help you attract more experienced users to help solve your problem, and will help future readers find your question, and the solution.
@JMichaelTX Thanks! I love your change, but than I just have that question to ask:
CAN I use hidden/disabled macros, WITHOUT enable them? I could enable them for a macro and disable them again, but maybe their is a more elegant way to do this too? (hopefully you didn't answer this already, maybe I should work through the macro you gave me )
It is generally better to activate/deactivate a Macro or Macro Group, rather than enable/disable it. Of course, it has to be enabled before you can change the activation status.
uff, yeah I see, I made it really hard to understand me...
Of course what you write totally makes sense and I think, this is clear for me.
What I want to know is, if it is maybe possible to run a disabled macro or (even more important for me) show a palette of all the macros of a disabled macro group (the macros in the disabled group/the palette could be enabled, that would be all right for my purposes) AND THEN click on a macro on that palette and it works (although the whole group is disabled)
Why I need that? I disable a lot of macro-groups, so that I can hide them ("view - hide disabled macro groups") for a better overview of the Macro-groups that are really important for me (that is also why I want the subfolder structure, because it really confuses my a lot )
So I wanna USE palettes of disabled macro-groups - bypass the disable somehow
so here an example, so that one can get the basic idea:
You have a macro-group that does a lot with the download-folder "Downloads" with a hotkey-trigger alt-d (I use it 100 times a day, so is has to be active all the time)
Their is another macro-group with the same hotkey-trigger alt-a that does a lot with my donut-archive "Donuts" (I use it 100 times a day, but only at lunchtime , so it has to be active for that time and - let's just assume that, reasons are plenty - only that shortcut makes sense for me)
No problem... I activate Donuts-Macro-group automatic from 12.00 til 13.00 (also deactivate Downloads automatic in this time) and the rest of the day it's reverse
Thats with a lot of different macro-groups with constantly changing content - so far so good
Now i want to use another Macro-group Download all Donuts in which BOTH macro-groups are used (open all Downloads and open all Donuts) → so I have a macro with uses BOTH, but ONE is allways disabled at the time - and that's good.
I could of course just enable the disabled macro-groups until I'm done with all my work, but honestly with so many macros it would be super-confusing and I never could be sure, that in the end all the macros that must be disabled most of the time, really ARE disabled and that whould endanger my whole system with the automatic activation/deactivation (I tried a lot, but in the end, it all collapses )
Well, I'm still fuzzy on your use case (what are "donuts"?), but I'll try to give you my take on best use of Macro Groups. Others may disagree.
There should be little need to manually control Macro Groups, or to select one, during normal workflow operations.
The need to manually work with Macro Groups is during KM editing sessions, when you are editing Macros and assigning them to Groups
The primary purpose of MGs is to control the automatic activation of its Macros as you move from app to app.
This does not require you to do anything other than when creating/editing a MG to choose the App(s) for which it will be active.
For example, this "Chrome" MG is ONLY active when Chrome is frontmost:
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I can, and do, have Macros in different MGs that have the same trigger, but there is no conflict because ONLY one of these MGs can be active at any point in time. For example, I really like using ⌃T as a trigger:
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OTOH, I have multiple Macros with the same trigger in the same MG because they are closely related. When I press that trigger, I get a Conflict palette, which is exactly what I want:
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So, when designing/creating your MGs, the first pass should be by App, so that the Macros in that MG are only active when the App(s) are.
You may have some Macros which you need, in addition to those specific to one app, for use in multiple apps. So you create another MG just for that:
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You may also find it useful to use separate MGs for separate windows of the same app. For example, this MG is active ONLY when QT Player has a window titled "Audio Recording":
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The exception, of course, is for those Macros that you need in ALL apps. Those would go into a Global MG. You should try to minimize the number of macros in this type of MG. Most macros should be App specific.
So, the point is that you don't need to try to enable/disable MGs, in most cases, when you are just using the Macros in those MGs. Proper design should activate/deactivate the MG and its Macros as you move through your workflow, moving from app to app.
Note: I have made some generalizations here which may not apply to specific users or workflows.
Make sense?
So, I hope this helps. If not, then please provide us with a detailed, real-world, step-by-step of your workflow, including the App that is used in each step.