How to Disable All Macros

Scenario 1: About to give a presentation with my computer and forgot I have a million macros with popups that I need to temporarily disable. No time to open up KM and manually go through and disable all my groups.

Can I create a macro that quickly disables every macro group? Ideally, I would also be able to somehow exclude one or two groups, but the essential thing is that this is fast will always work even if I add new groups.

Perhaps I could open up debugger and pause new macros, but what about scenario 2?

Scenario 2: My mischevious sister needs to do something on my computer and I can't watch over her shoulder. The debugger isn't good enough, because she could see the debugger window, investigate it, and end up messing with my macros.

I could make a macro with an action for each group, disabling that group. It's just not what I'm looking for because that means I need to regularly keep that macro in sync each time I add a new group by adding an action to disable that group.

Applescript has a setMacroEnable, now all I need is a method that gets a list of all the macro groups I currently have, unless there is another solution.

Any ideas?

Quit the Keyboard Maestro Engine. In the status menu, at the bottom is Quit Keyboard Maestro Engine.

Launch Keyboard Maestro later to relaunch the Keyboard Maestro Engine (or use File ➤ Launch Engine if Keyboard Maestro is already running).

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Thanks. I guess there is no easy way right now to exclude a few groups that I always want to run.

Actually there is:

  1. In the Macro Group Panel, select ALL groups
  2. Disable
  3. Now select the few Groups you want to be active
  4. Enable
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I actually didn’t think of that and it helps a lot, thanks.

I don't see a button to enable and disable macro groups when I have multiple selected. How do I do this?

It is the checkbox at the bottom of the Group list:

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Thanks. Very helpful. Any way to disable multiple macros via a keyboard shortcut (built-in or not)?

Select the macros and then click the tick mark button at the bottom of the macro column, or select Disable Macros from the View menu.

Thanks @peternlewis! And thanks to @nikivi I have a macro for that :slight_smile:

One little thing. As the number of the macros I select varies, I can't set a keyboard shortcut in "System Preferences" for "Disable macros"/"Enable macros".

Hey @politicus,

Use a Keyboard Maestro Select or Show a Menu Item action.

Note especially:

“Alternatively, you can start the name with an ^ and use a regular expression to match the menu.”

-Chris

To illustrate @ccstone's point, I made a macro soon after KM8 was released that does just that. In fact, you should already have it if you've imported @nikivi's macros: How to set a keybinding to enable/disable action / multiple actions?

OK. One more reason to learn regex :smiley: Saw this technique in @nikivi's macro.

Exactly right!

For info, I downloaded the 1400 macros yesterday, deleted around 1000 macros because of no use for me.
After, I tried to make the Enable/Disable macro work, with no luck. I do not know why, but yesterday macros with a Ctrl+key didn't work.

Today everything is working very well.