It would be great if the "Show Menu" action had an option to "Choose Menu Item by Name", so you could fill in the action quicker.
The behaviour I imagine would be similar to the Execute a Macro action which lets you Select Macro by Name.
Since we already have a "Select Menu by Name" action (great addition!), I'm hoping this is relatively do-able.
Just click on the Menu drop-down:
to get this for example:
I do, and that's ok for simpler apps, but usually I spend a while guessing and menu diving to work out where that menu item is (since I usually activate it with the keyboard). Apps like Logic, Final Cut, or even Keyboard Maestro have huge nested menus to navigate.
Gotcha! I'd re-title your post as "Feature request" in that case.
I went with Suggestion as the category was called Questions & Suggestions.
I like the politeness of suggestion!
Politely tagging @peternlewis to see what he thinks of it…
Another use case is I'm often automating things that I normally do with the keyboard (but a menu select would be more reliable). Sometimes a menu item doesn't even exist for the command, so it would be helpful to search for it within the editor.
Instead of menu diving, just go to the app, click on 'help' and type in the name of the menu. Hover over the search result and it will show you exactly where it is.
For example:
Thanks. I know the things I can do, but none of them are as quick as the thing I'm suggesting.
Switching to another app, searching the menus, and then going back to Keyboard Maestro to navigate through the menus to find it, is the thing I'm trying to avoid.
Keyboard Maestro lets you use 'Search … By Name' at lots of places in the Editor – It has Insert Action/Variable/Token/Function/Macro/DateField By Name.
So It seems consistent with its design that you should be able to do the same with menus – and the interface seems to have been partly designed already with the new Search Menu by Name in KM11.
I'm a bit confused by this bit -- doesn't exist in the app (gonna be tricky for KM to activate it!) or isn't listed in the KM action's dropdown of menu items available?
I made the suggestion because I don't know the things you know. That's why I suggested it. That's how these things work sometimes.
Also, other people come along and read these discussions and not everybody knows everything, so for some people reading they might be like "oh.. hey.. I didn't know that".
Doesn't exist in the app. If I'm trying to create a macro to do something I usually do by hotkeys, a search pane will help confirm or deny the existence of a corresponding menu item, without leaving the Editor.
I'm just giving my personal examples. The short of it is that inserting menu actions is something you might do often, so having a way to do it slightly quicker would be a good thing.
Another example would be the "Show Palette" action. At the moment all of the entries are prefixed with Macro Group (even though they're all macro groups). If it just had the name of the group, you could hit the first few letters to jump there.
Ah, gotcha -- although I'm not sure how you can reliably search for a menu item that doesn't exist, given that you can't know what to search for. There's also the problem that, in some apps, some menu items don't "exist" until their parent is activated in some way -- Peter might be using trickery to get round that in the dropdown method which may not be available to a search method.
But if it could be done it would be a nice UI improvement.
Another alternative is to record the menu selection, then you can select the menu any way you want (including from the Help menu).
I'm not sure I'd implement an ability to select the menu by name, since that would have to search across all menus in all applications.
Thanks Peter, that's an interesting way to do it. My initial attempts were slightly clumsy, because I had to search the menu before it started recording, to avoid recording my other keypresses and clicks. And then I could only do one at a time this way.
My goal was to make it closer to the speed and convenience with which I can add keystroke actions, so it's less tempting to do it that way.
Just to clarify my suggestion, my thinking was the option would search the menu of one application, not all. I've very roughly illustrated that here, which to me feels consistent with the "Execute a Macro" action's interface.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand menu bar items…
Generally, if I was going to do this, I'd just click record, and then perform the whole sequence so you have all the relevant actions, then just use the actions that you need and delete everything else.
I have noted down the feature request.
Much appreciated, thank you!
