Lock vertical scroll possible?

Questions & Suggestions
1

Is it possible to "lock" the vertical scroll when the mouse is hovering over an action with its own scroll such as shell, applescript, etc?
One of the things that always bothered me is that when I scroll to see the content on one of those windows, 90% of the time it scrolls it a little bit, then it reverts to scrolling the whole macro. I'm not a fan of manually clicking the scroll bar to use it. I like the scroll wheel (that's why it was invented... right?).
It seems, not sure if by accident, that sometimes holding shift, cmd, or alt/option seems to kinda lock it, but not 100%. It decreases the chances of it scrolling the macro to maybe 20%, but still not perfect.

Is there a way to achieve this by changing some setting or using a different modifier key?
If not, would this be possible to implement, for those of you who are more familiar with how KM works behind the scenes in terms of UI and all that?

Would like to get some feedback before approaching Peter about this issue.

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2

Yeah it is annoying. I've found that by clicking inside the scrolling area usually lets me scroll normally without having the whole macro scroll. Have you tried that?

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3

It might well be the most needlessly annoying thing I've found in the Editor.

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4

My guess is that Peter will say the KM Editor's behaviour is limited by the tools and APIs he uses to create the Editor. Since this is normal behaviour for other apps like Safari, the API developers probably consider it an acceptable problem.

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5

Whatever the reason it is super annoying and makes for a bad user experience.

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6

Wouldn't be too hard to make a macro that opens the text content of the currently selected action in TextEdit/BBEdit/ScriptDebugger.

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7

This doesn't work for me. My best option is to scroll a bit and then grab the scrollbar when it appears.

An option to make the scrollbars always visible or resize the text field's height would be nice alternatives.

8

KM honours the System Setting "Appearance"->"Show scroll bars".

A total abomination of a default setting from Apple's "make it look like iOS" phase, and I urge every right-thinking person to hit the "Always" radio button ASAP...

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9

I'll give it a test run. Thanks for the tip!

EDIT: Can confirm this setting is much better for me system-wide :+1:

10

I don't know the intricacies of building an app, but if using a modifier could lock the macro's scrolling completely (whatever makes all actions go up and down), that would be a step forward, I guess. So locking it with a custom key combination set by the user would make the macro non-scrollable, while maybe allowing the action's text scroll?

Again, I have no idea what's happening in the background, so this is just a suggestion. Maybe others here can share their feedback on why this could/couldn't work?

11

As an audio and video editor, there are simply far too many moving parts to even try to make do with the hardware of a normal mouse. The way my screen jumping around was slowing my work down constantly drove me to expand those inputs.. ending up in places like this forum :slight_smile:

"Trackballs" are the standard solution, with a scroll wheel.
If you lift slightly, the wheel finger can turn it independently , reducing to 1-2% of that 20% mentioned above of missed, intended scrolls.

Sometimes people feel they are bulky for some operations. I like to use a flat trackpad beside the trackball, too. I go back and forth.

12

I've observed this too. I'm sure this is just a KM editor bug, but It'd be great to have it fixed.

13

Like I said, it's not at all just a KM editor bug. It might require KM editor tweaks to improve the situation, and it might be related to MacOS changes to mouse operation.

However, these changes occurred with Sonoma, when I had to alter the acceleration and sensitivity settings very carefully, related specifically to scrolling, for apps such as Pro Tools, Adobe Premiere Pro, iZotope RX, and Ableton Live.

I use the app "SteerMouse" which allows me to use, quite similarly to what the OP of the post described, to control each app and it's scrolling using modifiers I choose. There -are- things that change outside of an app's design which are in the OS, and suddenly change a lot of apps. This was my experience, for sure.

The acceleration and sensitivity are major factors, when one is a few pixels in or out. Perhaps there can and should be a fix from the KM Editor side, but only because most users will not use SteerMouse and MacOS keeps changing the acceleration settings (which makes the pixels jump slightly more than they did previously, which I would bet is causing these perceived changes rather than a "bug").

In audio and video editing, specifically, there are LOTS of "scrollable regions within scrollable regions" such as values on knobs among arrays of tracks with scores of notes. Thus, it's -very- important where the mouse is exactly. In SteerMouse I had to totally eliminate acceleration (using modifiers) of the cursor while scrolling in many apps, but only after the update to Sonoma, which allowed me to not lose my mouse as much.

If the acceleration is randomly increased by MacOS versions, this happens again and again! And to emphasize again, there are so many mice to choose from, that's why I use an app that allows me to do things differently than the OS, the mouse, and other apps make me do.

I mostly go on at length here because others might have similar issues and shouldn't be confused that it's only a KM editor bug when it's a "scroll within scroll" thing for me in KM editor and a huge number of apps, and I have working experimental solution. I had to update Adobe Premiere 2023 to Adobe Premiere 2024, and recently to Adobe Premiere 2025. The fact that the scrolling was messed up again after forgetting rushed me to SteerMouse to copy over my cursor acceleration and sensitivity settings.

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14

^ me to myself everytime trying to decide whether to tag him on the forum

Well there we have it :wink: (thanks for deep diving that)

That plus:

:slightly_smiling_face:

When I created some macros yesterday with long custom HTML prompts & AppleScripts, scrolling was quite frustrating. Sounds like it ain't Stairways' fault (supported by the reputation of hostility towards defects)... this newbie could probably count on one hand how many times it was.

gif of Dual Scroll Bar Conflict issue

Keyboard Maestro Dual Scroll Bar Conflict 2025-03-29

OS: macOS Sequoia 15.3.2
Using two-fingered scroll on MBP trackpad

Now, did Apple leave a way to fix this without introducing future compatibility issues or suffocating maintenance overhead? Who do we know around here...

RE: undesirable scroll behavior (scroll hijacking) concerning nested scrollable elements within action text fields in the KM editor, where the main editor view captures scroll events intended for nested action text fields

@peternlewis , would you mind taking a look at this at your convenience?

--

btw @nednednerb if you have a copy of a complaint for Apple.com/feedback I'll submit it (e.g. "stop changing the accel w/o documentation" or whatever the core issue)

PS on noisneil workaround

:bulb: nice

Don't forget the copy back into KM? :wink: Oh could that be as advanced as someone wanted it to be...

15

Sorry, this is simply the way macOS works. The system controls this, it is not something Keyboard Maestro does, or has control over, or even has any say in.

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16

@peternlewis Would pop-out, resizable windows for scripts happen to be on your to-do list for the next major version by any chance?

17

Not really, no.

A million years ago Bare Bones developed the external editor protocol which was in the past supported relatively widely (for example, Anarchie/Interachy, my FTP client would let you edit a file on an FTP site using this protocol).

It's possible I'd support that somehow, but it's not widely adopted so probably not.

1 Like
18

I had a thought about this. In Logic Pro you can choose an external audio editor in the preferences. Then you hit a hotkey and the selected audio region's parent file opens in that program. You can edit it and save, and the changes are reflected in Logic.

Could you do something similar? Add a preference in KM to choose an external text editor so that the user can hit a hotkey and have the contents of the currently selected script action open there. Do your edits, save and the script would be updated in the KM action?

As I'm typing this, I realise we could create a macro for it, but it seems like such a fundamental and logical improvement to the app itself, that perhaps it's something you'd like to try. Or not. It's your app!

19

I have zero knowledge on how everything works, but for example would it be possible to set a key (for me it would be Option) to lock just the scroll function of the macro itself? That way I could hold Option while the code action was visible and just scroll that action's content while the macro's scroll was locked.

If that's possible, then the user could set whatever key or set of keys to lock it.

20

One thing you might not know is that the KM Editor is written using third party libraries. The Architect of KM is limited to the design choices of those libraries. If those libraries don't support this feature that you are looking for, it's not possible to do without rewriting the entire library.