Weird Appearance of My Keyboard Maestro Editor

I assume this means that I have done something unacceptable to KBM. But what is the problem?
My screen is dark and there are stripes on it.


I am trying to list some words into a field of a program.
Thanks,
Ellen Madono

The stripes are because you entered a word in the search box in the upper right corner of the KM editor. Whatever word you entered must be in the trigger. It's also in your INSERT TEXT action because I can see stripes there too.

Screen Shot 2022-03-08 at 12.03.44 AM

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Hi @EMadono. Welcome to the Keyboard Maestro forum.

The Keyboard Maestro editor appears light or dark depending on the Appearance preference. If it switched automatically to dark, then it's no doubt set to System.

If you are new to Keyboard Maestro, this annotated screenshot might help you complete a search.

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Thank you. It is looking normal again. I am not new, but I am so incompetent most of the time. I decided to ask any dumb question. Just make KBM work. Thank you.

I love your arrows. How do you do that to a photo?

I'm not sure how he does it, but I can do a similar thing. First, you have to take a photo. I do that by pressing SHIFT-CMD-4 and then dragging the mouse around a rectangle. When I let go of the mouse button a picture pops up in the lower right corner of the screen. That image gets placed in a folder, but if you double click on it before it disappears, you get a menu around the image. One of the menu items is a square in front of a circle. If you click on that item a submenu appears with an arrow. Click on the arrow. An arrow should appear on your image. You can drag the endpoints of the arrow wherever you want. You can also change the colours and thickness of the arrow using other menu items. Once you are finished editing the image, there are several ways to proceed. One is to hit the share button in the upper right corner of the window and send it to another app for further options. I usually send it to Preview from where I can copy and paste the image into this window where I'm editing this message. Here's an example of some random things:

image

Other people may do things differently from me, but that's how I do it.

Yes, the annotation tools @Sleepy mentioned are powerful and similar to the tools built into iOS. You can also access them from the Finder by selecting an image file and previewing it (pressing the spacebar). Thirdly they are available in the Preview app. More information is available here: Annotate an image in Preview on Mac - Apple Support

I sometimes use these macOS/iOS native tools, but for the above screenshots I used the annotation tools built into CleanShot X. It can be purchased separately, but I’m a subscriber to Setapp and it’s included in this huge macOS app bundle. One very nice feature is that there is a separate tool that creates the sequence numbers.

My memory might be failing me, but I think an older versions of Skitch included this sequencing feature. At some point Evernote purchased Skitch and I think made some changes. I see that it’s still available on the Mac App Store: Skitch.

Skitch hasn't bothered to indicate whether it respects your privacy or not (see screenshot from the app store, below) and one user reported that McAfee reports that it contains spyware.

I'm probably around 7 or 8 on the 10-level paranoid scale, so feel free to be less paranoid than me. The reason its software is so old and not updated is likely because they would have to update its privacy panel and that would reveal things like it might be accessing your Contacts or something like that.

Hi, @EMadono. On the topic of macro searching, I thought you might want to be aware of the tip shared by @ComplexPoint.