1 - It would be nice to have the option of calling the Global Palette for one action via a hotkey, rather than always appearing when macros are available. This would mean not having to manually set up every macro group's palette options.
2 - The Show Palette of Macros action is great, but a pain to set up. It would be really handy to be able to add multiple (and/or all) macros in a group in one go, rather than individually. Alternatively, the same thing could be achieve by being able to optionally hide individual macros from their Group Palette.
Perhaps these things are already possible. If so, please enlighten me.
With respect to request #1: Can't you accomplish what you want by giving each of the macros the same hotkey trigger and using a conflict palette instead?
It's one approach but it's laborious to set up. Seems to me the Global Palette is one step away from being very useful. It would be nice to be able to hit the same hotkey regardless of the application and show its available macros. Better still if it were possible to refine the selection somewhat, as per suggestion 2.
I set all my Keyboard Maestro Application groups to Always activated and shows/hides a palette when and use the same hotkey, In my case this is ⌥⌘K (K for Keyboard Maestro). So, I never have to think what keys to press to show/hide the available Macros for whatever application is at the front. (i.e. if Photoshop is at the front ⌥⌘K will show its Macros and if Final Cut is at the front ⌥⌘K will show Final Cut's Macros.)
That's how I do it too. It's the default solution. But what if the front app is Photoshop and you want to launch Safari? For that you would have to set up the macro "open Safari" in every app. You can do that, but it works much easier with "Global Palette".
In my case, I have a Global Macro Group called Applications that is just Macros that launch Applications and use (in my case) ⌃P (for Photoshop) ⌃F for Final Cut Pro etc. And I don't worry about doubling up on shortcuts as that is where the Conflict Palette comes in. My Macro to launch Photos is called "Photos" meaning I hit ⌃P and Return and Photos launches. But to launch Photoshop I hit ⌃P and click on Photoshop in the Conflict Palette.
And... thinking about it, I mostly use the doc icons to launch my most used Applications... probably due to long habit.
@Zabobon This is certainly a good solution. But you need different palettes and shortcuts for it.
@noisneil wanted to use a shortcut to display a palette that shows app specific macros and others dynamically. I think this is only possible with the Global Palette.
You can get a selected action's XML via AppleScript:
tell application "Keyboard Maestro"
xml of first item of (get the selection)
end tell
...and you can set it:
tell application "Keyboard Maestro"
set xml of first item of (get the selection) to newXML
end tell
So "all" you have to do is find a way to get the UUIDs of the macros you want to include in the order you want to to display them in and edit the XML to suit.
I've got an idea of how to use this, but what I'd need to be able to do is get the UUIDs of multiple selected macros and append them all to a variable.
Do you think your AppleScript might be able to do that with some adjustments?
The idea is...
Select a bunch of macros, and hit a hotkey. All the UUIDs will be written to a variable. Each line of the variable will be prepended with <string> and appended with </string>.
These lines will now be included in the XML (between <array> and </array>) of a new macro, programatically created in the same group, containing a single action, Show Palette of Macros.
I reckon I can do some of this, but I might need a bit of help mate.
Dunno about all that, but perhaps this'll get you started...
Select the macros you want on the palette, hit the hotkey to trigger the macro, then when the dialog comes up select the "Show Palette" action you want to add them to and click "OK".
Caveats: Only works on an empty "Show Palette" action, and adds macros in the order they are shown in the Editor list at time of choosing.
I guess you could refine this by bouncing the choices through a TextEdit window so you could set your own order by moving lines around and add methods to append to or replace an already existing list of macros.
What I didn't realise until starting this was that you can drag'n'drop from the Macro list to the "Show Palette" popups, but those popups have to be there in the first place. Which suggests another approach -- programmatically create a "Show Palette" action with a load of spoof entries that you then drop your desired macros onto, then delete what isn't needed. It would still be one-by-one, but IMO quicker than navigating the menu hierarchy...
In case anyone fancies a tinker, the only way I can imagine this being better is if the it created the Show Palette of Macros macro from XML, named how you want, with the action populated and a hotkey assigned. Then all you'd have to do is select a bunch of macros, hit the hotkey and you're done. Not complaining though... this is terrific.
Edit: Took me about 10min to set up Palettes for all my groups! Happy days!
Unless I misunderstand what @noisneil is asking for, it seems that KeyCue from Ergonis Software is the perfect solution. I've used it for years. It does many other things, but I have it configured with a press-release-press-hold-Cmd key to show all active keyboard shortcuts. Not only does it show all active KM macros for the current app, but all other active KM macros organized by group, all app-specific shortcuts and all system shortcuts.
I use this all the time as both a memory refresher for what's currently enabled and a help in picking an unused key combo for new macros.
Thanks for the info, but that's not what I was after at all. I generally don't use keyboard shortcuts; I have a Stream Deck and trigger all my frequently-used macros from that. However, when I'm away from my desk and don't have the Stream Deck with me, I'd like to be able to access the macros available in each application. Some macros are triggered automatically and don't need to show up in palettes, so I was looking for a quicker way to populate a Show Palette of Macros action with those macros I do want to see. @Nige_S delivered (as he so often does!).
Another way to do this that might be simpler to maintain going forward is to make a new Group for the Actions you want to show on a Palette. Make this Group Active for the Application/s and set it to show/hide a Palette when you press a hotkey.
Then go to your original App Group of Macros and just ⌥⌘drag any Macros you want to show on the Palette into this new Group. This will make an Alias for each of these Macros. You can even multiple select and drag lots of Macros in one go.
Anytime you want to add or remove Macros from the "Palette" Group you can just delete the Aliases or drag more Macros in. The good thing is you can see at a glance what Macros will show in the Palette.
And if you name these Groups with the same prefix (such as "Palette Logic" "Palette Photoshop" etc they will all be bunched together in the list of Groups, again making them easy to maintain - or even delete in the future if you decide you don't need them anymore.
The thought of another twenty-or-so groups in my already cluttered group list... Maybe if KM gets a sub-group feature, but until then, no thanks.
There are no drawbacks with @Nige_S's macro that I can think of. Each group has a macro called "- Show Palette of Macros" at the top, containing all the macros I want to see for that app, and I can see them at a glance.
Setup: Set your preferred hotkey for showing the palette in the green action.
Usage:
Select macros you want to show in a palette.
Trigger this macro.
In theory, I think the macro creation could be done in the same AppleScript as the action population so it just appears like magic, but that's a bit beyond my ability at this point.
My problem was where to put the action. Not an issue if you're making a single-action macro that just pops/hides the palette, but I was also thinking of palette actions in the middle of macros -- as a replacement for a pick-list, for example. It seemed sensible to maintain a consistent UX -- add palette manually, populate palette -- than do different things in different situations.
Photos" meaning I hit ⌃P and Return and Photos launches. But to launch Photoshop I hit ⌃P and click on Photoshop in the Conflict Palette.
