Some other QuicKeys switcher questions

Questions & Suggestions
1

I’m just now finally switching from Quickeys. Here are some random additional questions:

  1. is there any macro for switching finder views (column, icon, etc.)? There had been in quickeys.
  2. any way to type date/time?
  3. any indication of key trigger conflicts? either internally in KM or with system hotkeys?
  4. what is the advantage of KM’s application switcher over the standard OS X switcher?

Thanks.

2

Hey There,

No. But you can do it with AppleScript.

Look for 'Insert Text'.

You can paste, or type.

Look in the 'Insert Token' pop-up menu for date formats.

Formatted (ICU) Date/Time lets you get really custom.

KM is designed to allow conflicts and has a conflict-palette that pops up when you hit a keyboard shortcut that has one.

KM will override System keyboard shortcuts with one notable exception: Cmd-Ctrl-D (define word).

It's more customizable. Play with it and see.

You read the section in the documentation?

-Chris

3

Re: switching Finder views: you don’t have to use AppleScript, I believe. You can just use actions to type a keystroke (to hit hotkeys) or select a menu item to change views.

If you want a “cycle through views” macro, you can nest shortcuts in if/then statements depending on which menu item is currently selected.

4

Thanks. I will look at the docs on the app switcher eventually. for now i just like the aesthetics of the built in switcher better. low priority there for me.

re: finder views, silly me, I had those quickeys macros forever but i see that now there are already hotkeys for the finder built in. cmd-1 etc.

re: over-riding system shortcuts, actually I found that was not true in one set of cases case. ctrl-arrows I was using to control iTunes, but in recent OS X versions they are by default used to switch desktops and access mission control. the system defaults were engaged until I changed those to something else.

5

There are a couple of advantages of the Keyboard Maestro switcher. It uses slightly different behaviour, so you can move backwards just by pressing the shift key, rather than having to press shift-Tab. Also, it can display pre-configurated applications even if they are not running, as well as applications that were recently quit.

There are several different kinds of hot keys. See the wiki.

Simply put, Keyboard Maestro’s hot keys will generally override Menu Command Keys and other in-app keys, but will not override system wide hot keys used by the system or other applications, except for Command-Tab.

2 Likes
6

Thanks Peter, I turned it off but will now turn the switch back on, didn’t realize that you could just use shift to go backwards. I like the use of up and down arrow keys as well when you have several apps open. I often just use Quickeys to open an app I already have up if there are too many apps open. Looks like a lot of nice features.