Silly question - What's the real use for palettes? What palettes are you guys making?

Hey guys,

I see the macro palettes that we can do with KM, but honestly, I can't seem to think of a use case that isn't inefficient. Could you guys share some of the uses you have for palettes?

Thanks

Imagine you had a bunch of things you want to in an application (say Mail.)

If you used hot keys for each of these, then:

  • it might be difficult to remember all your shortcuts;
  • you may run out of sensible shortcuts to use.

Instead, every time you want to do something in Mail you hit ctrl alt M and up comes your Mail-related palette.

That's my approach, anyway...

I do the same, but I use the same hotkey for pallets (Hyper + P) regardless of applicaiton.

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There is much discussion about palettes in the forum. You may want to try searches for:

  • "palette" as text
  • the palette tag ("tag:palette")

Hi @EttVenter, what should I describe it to you... just have a look and you will see how you can use palettes with different apps :wink:

https://twitter.com/myapfelworld/status/1002181647704510465

Have a look here on YouTube. There are many more examples :nerd_face:

Palettes I use a lot:

  • The new Application Palette
  • A Dock-like Palette of applications (in the Macro Library in Keyboard Maestro, you can insert an Application Palette example)
  • I use the Global Macro Palette, but mostly for historic reasons as it predates a lot of the other palettes.
  • I use palettes of characters for insertion of weird characters (eg menu characters like ⌘ and symbols like ◉)
  • In Mail, I have a palette of (mostly) canned responses. Most of them just insert a snipped of text, but some of them do most interesting things (like fetch and include a PDF of an invoice).
  • I have a similar palette in Terminal with canned commands.
  • I use several different conflict palettes in Preview for filing scanned PDFs. Most rename the file based on the current date and then either move it to a specific folder or store it in Yojimbo with specific tags.
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