Text expanding macros don't work in dialog window prompting for input

Questions & Suggestions
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1

Steps to produce:

  1. I create a text pasting macro so that when ;wdc is typed, it is expanded to “Washington DC”.
  2. I create a another macro in which a dialog window pops up asking me to input data and then processing it.
  1. I type ;wdc into that dialog window.

Expectation:

;wdec is expanded to “Washington DC” as intended in Step 1.

Actual result:

;wdc is not expanded. Probably because the dialog window still belongs to Keyboard Maestro and macros do not work inside Keyboard Maestro?

Side note

I realize that one obvious solution is to offload the text expanding utility to another app, like… TextExpander. But that kind of defeats the purpose of switching from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro.

2

I had mixed results when trying to reproduce. Sometimes it worked an sometimes it didn’t.

Video: https://youtu.be/LwY-jNlsPwo

3

Hey thanks. I edited the post to futher clarity what I meant by “dialog window”.

4

Bingo! I'm pretty sure that @peternlewis has told us somewhere that we cannot trigger a KM macro in the Prompt Action of another macro. Something to do with system limitations, but I'm sure Peter will be along to better explain.

BTW, thanks for the excellent problem description. I'm sorry that I don't have a better answer for you.

5

Unfortunately, correct. For reasons known only to Apple, you can monitor system wide typing, but it excludes your own application.

It might be possible to work around this one day, but it is a challenging problem.

You can use non-typed string triggers (eg hot keys) within the dialog.

6

Just to confirm this, TextExpander app has the same issue. You can't trigger a TE snippet while typing in another TE snippet.

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