I have KM set as a launch at login item in the user accounts preferences pane. After a restart this only appears to work partially. I get the Keyboard Maestro Editor window appear as part of the startup but nothing in the menu bar.
If I quit the editor window and then start KM manually all works correctly from that point.
I’m using Yosemite 10.10.2. Also Bartender application.
Anything I can do to fix this?
Check your system preferences, Login Items. In there should be listed only Keyboard Maestro Engine (generally not Keyboard Maestro, and definitely not both).
Given Bartender, its hard to know whether the lack of a status menu item means Keyboard Maestro Engine is not running. I suggest you add a macro in the global macros group, given it a hot key of “A”, and the Macro Palette trigger as well (the global macro palette should immediately appear), have its action be Display Text “Hello” and Speak Text “Hello” and Play Sound actions, then restart. When you’ve finished restarting, see if the Keyboard Maestro global macro palette is there or now, and press A and see if any text is displayed or the sound or text is spoken. If nothing happens, its pretty clear that the Keyboard Maestro Engine is not running.
Check the Engine.log file (Keyboard Maestro ➤ Open Logs Folder) and verify whether the Keyboard Maestro Engine (and correct version) launched, and whether it quit, and whether there are any crashlogs.
Thanks for this - it has fixed the problem. In Login items there were two listings. I removed Keyboard Maestro and left Keyboard Maestro Engine.
Good. You can have the Keyboard Maestro Engine only (this is the normal case) and then launch the editor whenever you need to modify you macros. Or if you really want to, you can have the Keyboard Maestro editor launched, and it will launch the Keyboard Maestro Engine.
But if you have both Keyboard Maestro and the Keyboard Maestro Engine in the login items, you run in to a weird race condition caused by the fact all the applications launch at once and none of them are really quite ready to be running yet. So the Keyboard Maestro editor tries to check whether its a valid version of the Keyboard Maestro Engine running, and that fails because the system is kind of locked up at the time. So it quits the Keyboard Maestro Engine, but that fails too. And then it launches the Keyboard Maestro Engine within the application, but that fails because the engine is already running. And then eventually the system gets around to processing events and notices the quit of the engine that happened earlier and quits the Keyboard Maestro Engine.
Simple rule: launch one or the other (usually just the engine) only. Never both the editor and the engine.