Is There a Way to Generate a Wait Indicator Until the Macro Finishes?

[martin]

I was asking for a similar thing here.

@appleianer recommended AnyBar to me:

Any Way to Show a Small Sign on Screen When a Macro is Enabled?

Thanks for your explanation @martin I use the BTT HUD display very often in my KM macros, as I really appreciate the centered display for actions. Here is an example how I start the recording of my internet radio in the background and the BTT HUD Display confirms me the execution of the KM macro. Thanks to the (free) app AnyBar, the recording in progress is shown to me in the Menu Bar. [2021_03_08_Support_4] The developer was kind enough to provide an AppleScript for the HUD display,…

You need to get some png files to make it show up in the menu bar.

Later, I found this post about BitBar:

Create menu bar status icons using BitBar

Sometimes I want to have a persistent notification or indicator generated by Keyboard Maestro. I might use this to have an alert, show that a macro is running, or anything else. [image] I've started using BitBar for this purpose. BitBar just runs shell scripts and displays their output in your menu bar. To support this, I've added a this script to my bitbar plugins. It simply concatenates all variables that begin with "bitbar__" and puts them in the menu. I then make heavy use of emoji and …

BitBar is now replaced by xbar.

xbar does not need png files. We can make emoji characters (or any text) to show up in the menu bar.

You can certainly integrate this in your macro.

1. show the icon (AnyBar) or emoji character (xbar)
2. run execute the other actions you made
3. after the actions are done, quit AnyBar/xbar.

Example for AnyBar (this requires that I have a png file named horse.png in the AnyBar folder [see instructions on the AnyBar github page]):

Example for xbar:

This requires that we have an applescript file named "kmstatus.1d.applescript" stored in the xbar folder. This is the AppleScript:

#!/usr/bin/osascript

####################################################
##### get all variables that begins with "xbar__"
#### this exmaple is made by user 'iNik' on KM forum.
####################################################
--set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {" "}
--tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to get (value of variables whose name begins with "xbar__") as text
####################################################

#### I made this just to get the value of one variable.
tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to get (value of variables whose name is "xbar Icon") as text

I found xbar more flexible. It's primarily designed for other functions. It has many plugins to show all kinds of things in the menu bar. But in our case, we only need to show an emoji or something in the menu bar to remind us a certain macro is running or a macro is enabled/disabled or whatever you want. Even just for this purpose, xbar allows us to show as much text as we want.

By changing the variable value:

We can easily get

in the menu bar.