How to Generate a Text List of all Actions in a Macro

[Airy]

@August

My KBM editor is getting slow and sometimes misses characters that I type. I've read that I need to reduce the size of the macro file.

I was able to reduce the size of my macro file by removing Images from Find Image actions and replacing them with my ClickOnWord() macro.

[August]

@Airy

I was able to reduce the size of my macro file by removing Images from Find Image actions and replacing them with my ClickOnWord() macro.

THANKS! I'm going to have to check that out.

I have also seen a macro that helps similarly by moving the saved images in the Find Image actions out to external files. Using an external file as an image source is directly supported by the Find Image action and this macro helps facilitate the conversion. Unfortunately, I didn't install it when I saw it, so I'm going to have to dig for it.

Thanks for the memory prompt.

[Airy]

@August

I have also seen a macro that helps similarly by moving the saved images in the Find Image actions out to external files

That's also a good way too, and I do it occasionally, but I found difficulties doing that because some apps change the DPI of an image resulting in a mismatch when reloading. So I avoid using files. Peter has mentioned this issue in other threads like this one:

Can't Find Images

To click relative to an image, you use the Mouse Click action, configure it to be relative to a found image, and take a screenshot of the desired area of the screen using Command-Control-Shift-4, and paste it into the image well on the action. The image has to be unique (which includes not being visible in the action if the image is small enough not to be shrunk in the image well) otherwise Keyboard Maestro will not know where to click. The Display option in the action will allow you to see wh…

[August]

@Airy

I found difficulties doing that because some apps change the DPI of an image

Do you know which apps to look out for? That seems a hairy problem to debug.

I had some macros that were growing over time, like some I'd created to automate saving Facebook items that I want to respond to later. Facebook would imperceptibly change a graphic element which I had been using to tell, for instance, that I had scrolled to the bottom of a list, so when the macro broke, I would fix it by adding a new capture into the macro as another OR condition, while leaving the older images in place, so that my macro would hopefully work no matter which version of the UI I was given.

Most of the time my Click on Found Image actions are ways to interact with an app's UI. For many of my macros, I think I can eliminate images entirely by using @noisneil's macro:

Create Tell Block for UI Interaction - "UI Browser Lite"

This is a work-in-progress attempt to replicate the functionality of UI Browser that I find most useful. I started work on this last night, and am quite excited about it. It builds on a clever script by @CJK, which returns information pertaining to the UI element under the mouse pointer, and uses this data to automatically create a functioning AppleScript tell block. Usage: Hover your mouse pointer over the element you'd like to interact with and trigger the macro, which comes with its trigge…

I've already used it on the color picker of TextEdit and found it very straightforward to use in generating an AppleScript snippet to click directly on a specific UI element, without having to get KBM to position the mouse at all.

[Airy]

@August

Do you know which apps to look out for?

My testing comes from about 5 or more years ago, so I'm not sure if it's still valid, but the macOS Markup utility and some free image editor called PaintX, I think, were what I tried. When I saved images, they changed the DPI resulting in complete mismatches. I think I had an alternative solution which was to always use the middle value in the Displays pane of System Settings:

I suspect that using a different setting than "Default" results in DPI mismatching. I think this was the underlying cause of my DPI problem. I haven't tested this idea in about 5 years, however. That was a tough problem to diagnose.

After that I just gave up editing images and just used screen captures without editing them, and I never had another problem.

[August]

@Airy

just used screen captures without editing them, and I never had another problem

That's what I've been doing all along.

Thanks for the voice of experience.