Tutorial Video: Customized Actions and Named Clipboards

#Tutorial Video: Customized Actions and Named Clipboards

New tutorial I just created. Short.

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I just started making some clipboards with actions and what got me hung up was somehow in your video you were able to paste in clipboard actions when the actions window had popped up but for me if that window is up it will not paste in the actions in Keyboard Maestro 7.2. I have to close it (command+k) and then paste in the action or just tab to the empty action area will avoid pulling up the actions. Strange it seem to work for you. As a side note it looks like comments are disabled for your video so no saying thanks there, so thanks!

I should have mentioned that - you need to click a second time in the actions area - the first time pops up the Actions window, and the second focuses the actions area. This has become such second nature to me that I didn’t even think about it.

Personally, I’d like to turn off the Actions window, but I can imagine the problems that would cause for people who turned it off by accident, so I’ll live with it. (I have a hotkey to make it go away, though. :slight_smile:)

I’m rusty in making tutorials. I need people to point these things out, to help me get my head back in the game. :slight_smile: So I really and truly appreciate the comments.

Regarding the comments, I hadn’t realized I disabled them. They’re activated now. Thanks!

I know this has been discussed before and I wonder if a decision has been made? Why not have an area dedicated to videos?

Not sure, but it’s a good idea.

I know for me, I’m putting my own Wiki together with all my videos, macros, plugins, JXA and Applescript snippets etc.

It’s just too hard to find things any other way. I couldn’t even remember what macros I’d published, and there wasn’t a simple way to find them.

Is your wiki “PUBLIC”?

If so, linkage please!!
:slight_smile:

Yes, but I’m cleaning it up and about to rename it. I’ll post soon. Like, today, if I can.

Superb!

How about a tag for "video" ?

Then you could combine it with other tags in a search, like:
tag:palettes tag:video

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Dan, this search should get you close:
user:DanThomas category:macro

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I have added a Videos page to the wiki:

https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/Videos

Currently it just has this video in it, but I'm sure it will grow.

And a video tag (also just added to this topic).

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Thank you Peter this is great, I hope it will grow, I have bookmarked the page. It would be great to see links to related videos in the Wiki, that would be very helpful!

For what it's worth I often find myself copying URL's or text, images etc so adding in a delete past clipboard action to these actions has been helpful. That way I can add the action and then when I go to paste in the screenshot or whatever I had copied previously it will be there to paste in rather than it adding the action again upon command+v.

Keyboard Maestro - Clipboard Actions - Image Click at the Center.kmmacros (24.1 KB)

By the way everyone that finds Dan's post useful should now see Dan's version of this on steroids, it's over the top amazing!

You just need to keep an eye open. Since a "paste" happens in the background, it may not actually finish before you do the delete. So if you ever start seeing the wrong thing get pasted in, you might need to add a delay between the Paste and the Delete Past Clipboard History.

With that said, it's quite possible that within the KM editor, that problem doesn't exist. But it can certainly happen when pasting into apps other than the KM editor.

It's funny you should say that because I wondered about that and noticed that problem as well. I didn't mention it in the post (I should have), but in the example macro I posted in the comment "action" it mentions this issue (not that you needed to download the macro, you're the master!). I did include a delay action to fix that very issue.

It's interesting, as a side note, I just downloaded and installed the macro I posted on a machine that isn't synced to my actions and the clipboard action was added but the actual contents of that clipboard which contained the image action with the click center of image all cued up didn't save. That makes sense for security reasons in case you had something in that clipboard that you didn't want accidentally posted/shared, that could have been easily overlooked. More amazingness by Peter no doubt.

Are you talking about the contents of a Named Clipboard? If so, the macro doesn’t actually know what the clipboard’s contents are, so those contents wouldn’t get saved when you exported the macro.

Does that make sense? Or did I totally miss what you were saying?

Yes the contents and right you are correct the macro doesn’t know what the contents are. Didn’t think much about it really since I didn’t know how the contents of it were stored since they persist when you restart your computer. So Keyboard Maestro (I image) is storing them somewhere so they always persist but the contents of the clipboard doesn’t export thankfully, though in this case that would be helpful.

The contents are stored here, I believe:

/Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro/Keyboard Maestro Clipboards.plist

Not that it matters - even I probably wouldn’t mess with that one. :slight_smile:

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Nice to know, thanks.

Thanks that just came in handy I rarely make Macros on my laptop but just needed this to have saved clipboard contents also be on my laptop.

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