[Request] Add Option to Prompt with List to Not Auto-Exit

[JMichaelTX]

[Request] Add Option to Prompt with List to Not Auto-Exit

@peternlewis, the Prompt With List action is one the great features of Keyboard Maestro. It is very easy to setup and use, and I have found many use cases for it.

Could you please add an option to the Prompt With List action to NOT automatically exit/close when the user clicks on another window.
It would also be great to be able to MOVE the Prompt window.

The current behavior is causing me and my clients a lot of problems. For example, I often provide a "Help" command as part of the list. Obviously, the user needs to be able to see the Help window at the same time as viewing and using the entire Prompt window. The Prompt is in a loop that processes any "CMD" the user selects, including "Help", until a selection is made that is designed to exit the loop.

But the way the Prompt with List currently works, as soon as the user clicks on ANYTHING other than the Prompt, it automatically closes. The Prompt is always in the very center of the screen, and sometimes obscures data the user needs to see in order to make a choice in the Prompt.

So we really need two new features/options for the Prompt wth List:

1. Remain open until either the user makes a choice (by Return or Double-click), or presses ESC.
2. Allow the user to move the Prompt anywhere to any screens on the Mac.
   • Bonus Feature: Allow us to set the location of the Prompt in the Action setup.

Many thanks for your kind consideration of this request.

If anyone else is reading this, and would also like this feature, please "like" this post, and/or post your own feedback.

Here's a short animated GIF that shows the issue:

[peternlewis]

Noted.

Movable is probably relatively straight forward.

Allowing it to lose focus, I'm not sure what the consequences for that might be, so that I don't know about. For one thing, once it gets behind a window it is hard to get back, since the engine has no Windows. So it would probably have to float. Anyway, I'll add it to the list to look at.

[JMichaelTX]

@peternlewis

Movable is probably relatively straight forward.
. . .
Anyway, I'll add it to the list to look at.

Many thanks Peter. Anything you can do to give us a bit more control of this very useful Prompt window would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, I noticed another user requesting that the Prompt be displayed at his mouse text cursor. I think it likely he meant mouse pointer, but IAC, having an option to display at mouse pointer would be great.

[Roel_Van_Gils]

That was my request indeed. I wanted to know if it whas possible to show the list in a similar fashion like the accented letter pop-over.

But I understand now that's not to know where the text insertion cursor is (since there's on API for that, I asume…?)

Having an option to show it at the mouse position would also be interesting, since it the mouse cursor is usually somewhere in the neighbourhood of the text insertion cursor.

[Roel_Van_Gils]

I'd like add one more thing to this discusison. I'm (also) a happy TextExpander user, and I noticed that their pop-up menus do appear right where the text cursor is. Does that mean they have their developers found a workaround to do this, or is there something I don't understand?

Thanks!

[peternlewis]

I don't know what TextExpander does, but I do know they have a lot more special cases to allow the text expansion to happen within specific text control fields, so maybe it is related to that.