Suggestion: Rename "Conflict Palette" to Make It Sound More Positive

Hi all

With thanks to the generous users on this forum and the various threads on palette organisation, I'm now using palettes and in particular conflict palettes much more effectively.

I stayed away from understanding conflict palettes for too long, because I was put off by the name: surely “conflict” is a bad thing? Whereas in fact, with the automatic creation of hotkeys they are (in some circumstances) much more useful than macro group palettes.

Maybe a rename to something more positive? Auto-palettes? "Just give your macros the same hotkey and KM will automatically create a palette and individual hotkeys for you."

It's a great feature. I just wonder how many other people are initially put off by the name?

Kevin

4 Likes

+1000

should be named "Matching palette"

I also avoided them, just very recently learned of its usefulness

2 Likes

I tend to agree.

When I first learned of "Conflict Palettes", I thought of them mostly as a clever way to catch my MISTAKES in giving more than one Macro the same Hot Key Trigger.

It was only much later that it occurred to me that this could be a very effective design pattern. And now, I use it very often.

I too now use "Auto-Palettes" (aka "Conflict Palettes") much more than I do "normal" palettes.

So I'd vote for "Auto-Palettes". :+1:

3 Likes

Same experience here. After using Keyboard Maestro for many years it was only really in the last year that I got the power and simplicity of the Conflict Palette.

Right from the start I realised that a great use of Keyboard Maestro would be to be able to quickly open the folders and files I use the most instead of constantly digging through folders to get to them. To that end I made a simple Macro to open a specific folder and gave it a hot key that I would remember - so, in my case ⌃⌥⌘D would open my Dropbox Folder. But I quickly ran out of letters. So, for example, what shortcut would I use to open the Desktop Folder? ⌃⌥⌘D was already being used so I avoided that key combination. I limited myself to 26 shortcuts for the 26 folders I opened the most. Then it suddenly dawned on me (about a year ago) that it would actually be good to use the same shortcut as that way I didn't have to remember anything. If I wanted to open the Desktop Folder I could just take a guess that I would have assigned it ⌃⌥⌘D. Up pops the Conflict Palette and from there I just click on the folder I want to open. Really fast and hardly anything to remember.

It is like the Conflict Palette is actually the most powerful and user friendly and forgiving feature of Keyboard Maestro. And yet it took me ages to get it. And @JMichaelTX @hello @KevinCoates all had the same experience.

I wonder if it is not just to do with the name but the way it is presented or not presented when a new user first installs Keyboard Maestro? Maybe if it were one of the first things that a new user was prompted to use it would get taken up faster? Certainly when it popped up in the past I used to think "oops - I've made a mistake" rather than "wow - what a great feature".

2 Likes

yup, ^^^^ exactly my thoughts

just recreated a convoluted "HTML prompt" window macro to this palette, and now it's much much simpler to use, and maintain

1 Like

Yup, I agree with all of the above. The conflict palette felt like a mistake when I first came across it.

Just as an example of how flexible they can be, I now have two groups of Finder macros, one always active, one active when Finder is at the front. All macros with the same hotkey.

So the content of the Finder conflict palette changes depending on whether it’s invoked with Finder at the front. Being careful with the macro names means that the automatically generated hot keys don’t change, so muscle memory isn’t messed up, and the hot keys are anyway highlighted on screen which helps in learning them.

It’s a joy to use.

1 Like

Mighty @peternlewis, thoughts?

I fortunately found "Conflict Palettes" fairly quickly -- I'm still in my first week of using KBM. However, I too ran into the "not enough hot key choices" problem fairly quickly. I already use a program called CurrentKey Stats to set hotkeys to change to one of 16 different desktops spread between my laptop and my external monitor.

What I really wanted was a way to create a sequence of hotkeys. I use MacVim a lot and it allows me to do that for macros I define there. So all the steps in a particular workflow can all start with, e.g., F2 followed by a letter with or without modifiers to identify the individual steps.

The only sequences specifically offered by KBM are text characters. You cannot include modifier keys in the triggering text sequences. That frustrated me.

By luck and happenstance, I came across a reference to using Conflict Palettes this way and it's pretty close to what I wanted -- close enough to be very useful. The major downside is that it is not "intuitive" to define the macros that way using the Macro Trigger option and the first letters of the macro names. But I'm figuring it out.

1 Like

I've mentioned this before on the Forum - but the system that works very well for me is to leave the "most used" of the Macro names as a single letter. That way when the Conflict Palette comes up I just hit Return to trigger that one. All the other Macros that get pulled into the Conflict Palette need to have names beginning with the same letter for this to work. And I only do this when there is one Macro I really use a lot. In the example below ⌃⌥⌘K followed by Return takes me to this forum :smiling_face:

Also - I give my Macros simple white Icons rather then the default ones Keyboard Maestro generates. So, in the example below I can see at a glance that two of the Macros take me to folders and the "Default" one at the top takes me to the Keyboard Maestro Website.

Screenshot 2020-12-14 at 10.01.37

And the very powerful thing about the Conflict Palette is that these Macros are in different Groups. The only thing that links them is that they share the same shortcut:

K

3 Likes

I think BetterTouchTool can do this

@Zabobon
whoa, great tip man!

CMD-Shift-D opens palette:
Screen Shot 2020-12-14 at 8.28 AM
Return opens Desktop

"Disambiguation palettes"? -1

My suggestions:

  • Anthagonist palettes
  • Feud palettes
  • Fracas palettes
  • Rivalry palettes
2 Likes

Best name until now for me is "auto palette" because of the way the palette is created. And I think many users of KM are fond of auto-things :wink:

4 Likes
  • Altercation palette
  • Antipathy palette
  • Appomattox palette
  • At Loggerheads palette
  • Clash palette
  • Contention palette
  • Donnybrook palette
  • Macro Wrangler palette
  • Orthogonal Insanity palette
  • Overcongruity palette
  • Peace Pipe palette
  • Quick-Key palette

:sunglasses:

1 Like

Disambiguation Palette

1 Like

Doppelgänger palette

I like that, it's very 'John le Carré'.

1 Like

chris,

I suspect you're just having fun, but having a long list makes picking a choice (for Peter) much more difficult.

On top of that, I don't like any of your suggestions.
:sunglasses: :wink:

Conflict is the right word for a conflict between multiple meanings of the same shortcut. It's not an uncommon usage in application software that allows such a thing.

1 Like