When I open KBM after a system reboot, the Editor History is frustratingly meaningless. I keep the KBM Editor open all the time, in it's own Desktop Workspace and I use the History regularly to move between Macros and SubMacros and Subroutines that are interlinked, etc. Lately I have noticed (it may have gone on forever without me noticing) that right after a system reboot, the Editor History is full of macros that I have not opened in months or maybe even a year or more.
Just now, I rebooted because my battery ran out (me not paying attention) and I went to pick up a KBM project that I'd been working on two days ago. Without my doing anything in KBM except invoking my Desktop-switching macros, the Editor History now has two entries in the Forward History, macros that I have not looked at in a long time, including a backup version that I dated in the title as June 8, 2024. The Backward History does not list any of the macros that I've recently been working on, instead it lists a whole bunch of macros that I had been working on in that same time period and which I'd mostly abandoned because my development path took a different direction.
That Editor History, forward and back, has nothing to do with what I've been doing in the past few months.
I'm not finding anything in the manual, the wiki, or the forum that gives me a clue.
I've been working with KBM for five years now, and it was a bit of a surprise to search for an issue that was bugging me today only to find that I had asked a similar question five years ago, when I was very much a newbie.
Well, I still can'f find any more documentation than that single line, on the page that Chris linked to.
Then, five years ago, I just wanted to understand the Editor controls. For a few years now, I thought that I did. But today I'm discovering that the Editor History is not behaving at all like I think it should.
The KBM Editor opens at login and I usually never close it. In this case, and the other day when I noticed it too, the system shut down because the battery had run out without me noticing until too late.
Start simple - make a change to a macro, then change to a different macro, then click and hold on the Modified button, and verify that the macro you changed is shown at the top.
Then quit and relaunch the editor and check whether the macro is still shown at the top.
If not, the issue is likely that the relevant file (Keyboard Maestro Macro Stats.plist I believe) is corrupted or has invalid permissions and so the information cannot be saved.
If it remains correct after relaunching the editor, then the issue might be that the editor was never quit and so never saved the file. You could check the Editor.log file and see if the the editor quit before it was launched each time:
Clearly the Editor has not quit in a way that generates a Log entry since September. That was my first test.
I opened the Modified list by holding the button and picked a macro from the middle. After opening that macro, the Forward History list was empty, as to be expected.
I quit the editor and restarted it. At this point the Forward History list had 10 items and the Backward History had 8 items. The Editor.log file showed me quitting and restarting 10 seconds later. Fine.
However, the Modified list showed the macro that I had been looking at at the top of the list. I made no changes to it.
So should I quit and restart the Editor as part of my workflow when I want to save things? Why doesn't this happen in the background? Why doesn't it happen when the system shuts down?
Could it be added as a File menu item, to "Save Modified and History" instead of having to exit and restart?
However, that's not the only thing I see in the log:
2025-11-16 20:13:07 Editor Quitting
2025-11-16 20:13:17 Editor Starting 11.0.4
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 13 times
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:18 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Engine is already running
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Plug In Action with Name Pushover Notifications
Last message repeated 3 times
2025-11-16 20:13:20 Invalid Name (null) for Plug In Action Pushover Notifications
I searched my macros and there is one macro that contains a call to a macro called "Pushover Notifications" which does not actually exist. The calling macro is one that I had downloaded from the forum, couldn't get it working, and disabled it. Yet somehow KBM is reporting errors multiple times a second, apparently from that disabled macro. That seems weird. I've deleted it. Hopefully KMB will be peppier now. There are, at this point, no more Editor.log messages about it.
At this point I guess my workaround is to periodically quit and restart the Editor if I want the History to be useful.
Why it is not being is the question and I don't have an answer for that - if you aren't cleanly shutting down the Mac (if it is dying because its out of batteries for example), then that is going to be a problem. If the editor is crashing or being killed for some reason, or the system is not quitting it, that's all not as it should be.
Why doesn't it happen in the background? Because its not coded that way - why waste CPU and wear on the disk saving something that doesn't need to be saved except between launches?
This is referring to a Plug In action which is invalid or missing.
Check your Keyboard Maestro Actions folder in the Keyboard Maestro preferences folder (~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro). Or search for the plugin action that references it.