The Log action message "action"

[jonathonl]

Log action

If you want to write several lines e.g. five at one go,

How do you force a newline?

Also, if Log action has several lines,

How do you expand the text box to see them all ?

[Airy]

@jonathonl

If you want to write several lines e.g. five at one go,

How do you force a newline?

Press OPT-RETURN to force a newline. That field actually supports multiple lines of text. This isn't the only action in KM that displays one line of text but allows multiple lines. I forget what the others are, but I've used this technique before.

The characters "\n" can also be used to cause a line break. This allows short lines to be visible at the same time in the edit box. But it doesn't really help if your lines are long.

@jonathonl

How do you expand the text box to see them all ?

The UP/DOWN arrow keys actually do work in this box if you have multiple lines in there.

It should be easy to write a macro that presses CMD-A, then CMD-C, then displays the clipboard int a window, if you want a better way to see what's in there.

[jonathonl]

Was really aimed at Peter as it is frustrating on a number of actions that you cannot see everything easily .

I think there should be an "expansion" button.

[Airy]

@jonathonl

Was really aimed at Peter

And perhaps my comments was really aimed at other readers who may not know these solutions.

[hemicyon]

@Airy

other readers who may not know these solutions.

I appreciate this a lot. I learn so much reading other people's posts, old and new, asking the same/similar to questions I have and questions I never even considered. I can't possibly be the only one.

[griffman]

@jonathonl

Was really aimed at Peter as it is frustrating on a number of actions that you cannot see everything easily .

I think there should be an "expansion" button.

I brought this up a while back as a feature request:

Feature request: Auto-expand all input fields

This came up in this thread about a regex issue, which wasn't really a regex issue at all, but an input error: The user wanted a regex of \[.*$, but somehow entered that four times, once per line, in the regex field. But in the Keyboard Maestro editor, there's no way to tell that there's a problem: [image] It looks fine. The only way we figured out there was an issue was by having the user upload the macro. I installed the macro, selected all the text (Cmd-A) in the input box, copied it, the…

The technical limitation is that the text fields cannot auto expand. So I asked for an indicator of some sort, so we'd at least know there was more text there. That got a "maybe," so I've got my fingers crossed :).

-rob.

[peternlewis]

The Log action is really only aimed at logging a single line of data, since the log itself is really made up of lines of data.

If you want to log more stuff, I suggest you create your own log file.

@griffman

The technical limitation is that the text fields cannot auto expand.

Technically, my multiline text views auto expand using code I've written. Single line text fields do not expand since they are only intended to have a single line.

[griffman]

@peternlewis

Single line text fields do not expand since they are only intended to have a single line.

If that's the case, can I change the feature request to ask for multiline text views for input boxes where more than one line is common, as in a regex replacement box? I use these all the time for HTML code, because it's blindingly fast to search an entire list and spit out formatted HTML :).

Though I'd still love a nice bold indicator of some sort for any single-line text box that contains more than a single line of text.

-rob.

[peternlewis]

@griffman

If that's the case, can I change the feature request to ask for multiline text views for input boxes where more than one line is common, as in a regex replacement box? I use these all the time for HTML code, because it's blindingly fast to search an entire list and spit out formatted HTML :).

You can ask, but I'm not sure I'm going to do that.

@griffman

Though I'd still love a nice bold indicator of some sort for any single-line text box that contains more than a single line of text.

Yes, that would be nice, but I don't know that I can do that I'm afraid.

[kevinb]

@griffman

Though I'd still love a nice bold indicator of some sort for any single-line text box that contains more than a single line of text.

Conceivably, Markdown support in text boxes could deal with that—along with other markup in Comment actions, which would be especially useful when a comment is used for documentation. Of course, that's not a great need.