I'm lucky enough to have an old USB mini keyboard-trackball unit. I hot-glued this onto an old LCD Monitor stand (said monitor is now on the wall with some friends) so it sits upright (well, at the same angle as my MacBook screen). I have stuck sticky labels over most of the keys showing their new function - examples are "SHOW SERVICES", "STOP API2" and so on.
These keys are used as USB triggers to paste the contents of named clipboards to run commands I need. It works really well for me, saves me much typing (and typos!).
I recently changed my macros to add in two steps: copy system clipboard to named clipboard "temp_scratchpad" before pasting the named clipboard with the command in it, and (you guessed it) copying the temp_scratchpad back to the system clipboard before finishing.
KM is a really astounding product and I am so glad I found it!
Keep safe, everyone.
I’d love to see how the inputs from that keyboard are differentiated from other keyboard inputs
Hmmm...I shouldn't have looked at this. I would never have thought of this. Quick question: I just hooked up a USB keyboard and easy peasy, it works. However, in testing a simple text entry action, it duplicated the trigger. That is, my trigger is the letter 't' on the external keyboard, and it should type the word testing. Instead, it typed ttesting. I got around it by adding a delete action as the first step, but do you have an idea why it would be doing that?
I'm going to get a lot of use out of this idea. Thanks for sharing!
he used a Delete keystroke as first action, I'm guessing it's the same for all of them.
Yes, delete first. You’ll find that some macros will need a /n at the end of the named clipboard and some won’t depending on your exact application.
Certain keys do not need the delete keystroke at the beginning - you’ll find this out for yourself.
Happy this has helped. Keep safe...
@hello , @c15jon - Duh, I didn't look at the screen shot closely enough. My bad! Reading really IS fundamental...
All seriousness aside, I'm already seeing lots of ways I can use this. I'm glad I kept that old keyboard around. Great idea!
yup, nice alternative to Stream Deck