Macro Group activation simply produces "Enabled"

#1

A newbieish question. I have a macro group that is set up to be activated for one action when the hot key ‘F15’ is pressed. There is at this point only one macro in the group, at the moment, with a trigger hot key of ‘D’. When I press F15, a gray Keyboard Maestro panel flashes up with the message about F15 being enabled and then disappears. If I immediately press F15 again, nothing happens. No panel appears.

What I am looking for is what happens with another similar macro group that I have created. iWhen the macro group hot key is pressed the panel appears with a list of the macros in the group. I press a macro hot key trigger (usually a letter) the macro is triggered. This is what I am hoping for in not so successful macro group outlined above

What gives? Someone with more experience needs to tell me what is going on. TIA

#2

The Macro Group is configured to be “Activated for One Action”, so immediately after pressing F15, you can press “D” and the macro will trigger.

If you want a palette of the available macros to be show, use the configuration “Show a palette for one action”.

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#3

Thanks Peter. My Stupyslexia struck again and I couldn’t see what was different from the other Macro Group settings. That was the problem. We are now in business.

Am I right that when the focus is on a displayed palette, any keystrokes I make will be interpreted locally. For instance, I could have two groups with macros having triggers of 1, 2, 3, 4 and there will be no conflict as to which macro to trigger if they are contained in a macro group defined to display as above?

#4

Not entirely. The macros within the group are active when you activate the macro group. At that point, they and any other macros that are active are able to be triggered. If you have some other macro with “1” as the trigger, then you will end up with the conflict palette appearing to disambiguate the two.

If you had two such groups, both activated independently, then you would have no problem.

#5

Thanks Peter. I am beginning to get a handle on the concepts.

#6

Peter

I have run into a further problem. I have a macro group a hot key of F15 which displays a palette where I can choose a macro with a simple trigger of a letter.

This works really well except for one problem. When working in InDesign the hot key characters IOSHNM no longer work. The macro isn’t triggered, but neither is the character added to the text stream. If I turn off the KM engine, all is well. I can type any of the character and have it show up.

Are my settings wrong. Is this an InDesign/KM anomaly?

#7

With those settings, and assuming there are no other macro groups or macros involved (a big assumption!), and assuming you are not activating the macro group with some other explicit action, then the macros will be active only when the palette is shown, which only happens in InDesign immediately after pressing F15.

The keys should be swallowed and trigger the macro only when the palette is open.

Check your Engine.log file to see what macros are being triggered.

#8

Thanks Peter.Still having this intermittant problem, but I have another question that I think is linked.

I have a macro group set to display a palette with one action. I want to only trigger this macro group from a macro in another macro group. The action in that macro is Show Macro Group ‘Markdown’ for One Action, the option is Show palette for one action

The macro group Markdown is set to Shows a palette for one action when:.

What should the Markdown be set to if I only want it to display a palette for one action from the first macro group and for no other reason.

TIA

#9

Just leave all the checkboxes off in the settings of Markdown, and have it configured to be any of the options that are not immediately active, so Show palette for one action is fine.

#10

Thanks Peter. Further question just to get my head around what is happening. If I call a macro group from an action, do the settings in the calling action replace the settings set in the macro group. How do they interact?

If instance I had a macro group set to show a palette for one action using a hot key (say for instance, a group containing Markdown related actions) and I also had a macro that would call the group with settings to show palette, (that would be triggered when Sublime Text was active and the front application had a window with a title that contains .md — Is that even possible?). Which settings would take precidence? Would they both be active? Would they be running separate instances of the action?

#11

The settings in the macro group do not get changed. The settings that the macro action indicates get applied for the moment. The exact interaction between different styles of settings is not really well defined I’m afraid. Basically it does what the macro action says and then goes back to behaving like the macro group at the next appropriate juncture (typically this would be an application change or a macro reload).

There is only one macro group, so it has only one setting active at a given time - it is temporarily superseded by the macro action.

Generally, if you need a macro group to behave in weird ways, it would be better to do all the control yourself with macro actions and just leave the macro group in a basic setting.

And yes, you can create a macro that is triggered when Sublime Text is active and the front window contains a specific string using some combination of macro group settings, window change triggers, and window title tests.