Is there a way to change the name of a variable across many macros?

[mikewolf1127]

Is there a way to change the name of a variable across many macros? Essentially find/replace for variable names across many macros?

[Airy]

This post tells you how it can be done, but it's not easy:

Find and Replace text in macros

Hey Jeremy, Not in the Keyboard Maestro Editor. You can export the macros – do a find/replace in the XML files – and then reimport them. TextWrangler (or BBEdit) will let you do a multi-file search/replace. This is not simple, but it's doable. In general macros accessing the file-system should use relative paths for portability. So instead of: /Users/your-user/Downloads/your-file.txt You'd use: ~/Downloads/your-file.txt There are Expand Tilde in Path and Abbreviate Tilde in Path filte…

Fundamentally, the reason this can't be done with variable names is that KM is so powerful that variables names can be constructed on the fly, or they can be buried deep within script actions. There is no way to "locate" a variable unless you actually RUN the macro, in some cases. Compare that with macro names - if you change a macro name it is immediately changed in all the Execute Macro actions across all macros, even if the macros are disabled. (Although if you put a macro name into a script, it won't catch that copy.) This prevents all kinds of programming errors, but means we have to go to a lot of extra work to execute a macro whose name is stored in a variable.

The Architect said 3 years ago that there was no plan for a general Find and Replace at this time.

Native Find and Replace in Macro Editor

There are no plans to implement this at this time.

However I'll tell you what I'll do. I have a sneaky way of creating a macro that runs in the background and can generate a beep whenever it "sees" a name of your choice on the screen. That will almost be half as good as a "Find" ability in the KM Editor. I'll go write it now, and place it into the Macros forum.

[Airy]

Try this new macro if you want the ability to search for words or variables in the visible portion of the KM Editor window...

Speak Words if they appear in the KM Editor's window Macro (v11.0.2)

I saw several threads in which people were asking if there was a way to search a macro (or a set of macros) for a specific string or variable name. So if the problem is finding strings, this macro could help out, because it is designed to alert you whenever one of a set of words is visible in the KM Editor's window. It runs every 2 seconds in the background, which seems like a good interval to me. You could change the interval, or you could change the name of the program that it works with. It …

[Nige_S]

@mikewolf1127

Is there a way to change the name of a variable across many macros? Essentially find/replace for variable names across many macros?

Don't forget that you can use the Editor's "Search" box to find all the macros containing a certain string, and using the word: qualifier will reduce false positives. Matching actions within those macros will be highlighted for you, so an horrible job is at least made easier.