The “Quick Macro” has timed out on me so many times over the past year+ that I finally took the time to ask about it. I usually use it when I am in a hurry so haven’t posted.
Anyway the title says it all there are so many times when I am trying to automate keystrokes or renaming of macros in Keyboard Maestro and when I press a key the macro pallet disaperes a few seconds later and doesn’t record the actions
When I inspect ~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro/Quick Macros.plist
I am don’t think it is only Keyboard Maestro that it fails in but I can’t confirm that, I just know it has turned off on me many times when trying to use it. I love that it works and doesn’t try to do more things then key strokes like QuicKeys did which for me made the function in QuicKeys so much less useful.
For the documentation I don’t see anything documented about the three options “Enable Key Repeat” “Add to Macro Palette” and “Add to Status Menu”
The key repeat was what I wanted to read a little more info on and how that would work in conjunction with your computers key repeat setting if you had a string of commands you had just saved in the “Quick Macro.”
Quick Recording stops if you change your macros. So if you try to use Quick Recording while editing a macro, as soon as you change your macro (and a short time later when it is saved) the quick recording will be terminated.
This is not ideal for your usage case, but it is how it works currently.
I'm glad you like it, but I don't understand this sentence. Keyboard Maestro records more than just typing, it records clicks and menu presses, application switches and other things. Quick Recording records the same things. However as a general rule I would recommend limiting yourself to just typing because you cannot see the recorded actions so you cannot see where things are recorded in a way that will not play back well.
Enabling key repeat will repeat the playback of the recorded macro while you hold the hot key down.
You can also trigger the macro from the Global Macro Platte or the Status Menu if desired.
Good to know, maybe something @JMichaelTX can add to the Quick Macro documentation.
Hopefully something that can be added as a checkbox to the Keyboard Maestro Quick Macro options in the future. "Don't Stop Recording When Changing Macros in Keyboard Maestro"
I am sure there is some logic to the current behavior though I am not sure what it is.
You know what I sort of knew that already but just forgot since I found it most useful with just keyboard shortcuts. The thing that I constantly found with QuicKeys temp macro is it would try to do too much and too many mouse moves and things would just fall apart for me so I often had to edit them first and they were much slower and well... not so quick. Good reminder though that I can use them to record more actions though.
This is definitely still true with KM. Keeping your hand off the mouse is always a good idea, when recording macros, unless you specifically want the mouse click.
@peternlewis Just coming back to this years later really hoping there could be a check box for this feature in a future update of Keyboard Maestro. There are dozens of times if not hundreds of times a month I use this in Keyboard Maestro and I would love to have the Quick Macro to keep on working if this is possible.
For example
Select a macro
Rename a macro ⌘+⌥+l
Arrow keys to select and or add text to several macros
Select the macros again ⌘+⌥+m
Move to the next macro above or below ↑ ↓
Then run the Quick macro. It does get me part of the way there on a lot of things but almost always times out for my need to use it in Keyboard Maestro and the needs constantly change hence using the Quick macro .
Unfortunately, any change to the macros results in the engine reloading the macros, which by necessity cancels the running macros. It's hard to imagine how this could be worked around.
Oh yeah that is a difficult one so if you made an exception to the macros that had the Quick Macro action in with "Allow Record in Keyboard Maestro Editor (Reloads Changes to This Macro every 3 Minutes if Checked)" checked it and just reloaded it every 3 minutes that would cause other problems. Does that sound like an annoying exception? I, for one, would use it all the time. Just today I have used it already dozens of times but it hasn't been as efficient as it could have been with a lot of extra mouse clicking in Keyboard Maestro Editor.
It's the other way round -- you'd have to stop all Engine reloads while any Recording was happening, so the macros themselves wouldn't update (the GUI would, but maybe not consistently) as you edited them and, potentially, you could lose "intermediate" changes.
Interesting, seems like all the macros could continue to reload so you wouldn't lose any changes but just no reload any macros that had the Quick Macro in it because of course if you tried to change the QuickMacro with itself then that would be a bit like trying to eat yourself at some point something would have to give.
