I’m still trying to get the hang of Keyboard Maestro. Frustrating and thrilling!
I have created a few palettes by turning a Macro Group into a palette. The only way I can toggle the palette on and off is by checking on:
Shows/hides a palette when: The corressponding status menu entry is selected.
And then selecting it in the menu manually.
I’m trying to find a way to do two different things:
- Have the macro palette launched from an action in another macro
- Have a macro automatically launch when a specific application launches
I think I can do (1) by also assigning a keyboard shortcut to the macro group and then having the other macro trigger that keyboard shortcut, but i’m running out of possible keyboard shortcuts.
For (2), i chose, the option to make it:
Available in these applications: [The application in question]
I like that the palette disapears when another application becomes active, but the palette won’t automatically open when the application is first run.
Any suggestions woudl be really apprciated. This is a tough one to Google, because the search words are too generic!!!
@richtack you can try posting your question on KM’s forum, you might have better luck there. KM Forums
Jeff - thanks, i’ll give that a try!
I use one palette to display other palettes as I need them. Sometimes I set it to show the palette for just one action. Sometimes it just shows the palette indefinitely.
Type in “Show” for the action and you’ll see a list of convenient actions. I used Show Macro Group for a group I’d already set as a palette.
This is really helpful, thanks!
I was looking for actions with the word “Palette.” I didn’t think to look for “Macro Group.” All makes sense now. I’ll play with the “For One Action” option!
Still didn’t find a way to show the default Applications Palette from a macro action, but having looked on the KM forum, I get the sense that you just can’t do it.
Without setting some sort of constantly firing macro to check for open applications I’d say that would be tricky; and doing so would be overkill. So let’s try and reframe the issue to one we can solve.
Option 1
Instead of launching the app and having KM watch and open the right palette, perhaps launch a KM macro that opens the app and the palette. If you use a launcher utility like Alfred that should be relatively straight forward to do.
Option 2
Have one palette open that when an entry is selected will run different actions depending upon what the currently active application is.
There could be other options and my preference would certainly be for the first, but hopefully there’s a nugget in there for something that would work for you.
Stephen -
Thanks!
You’re right, I did get the first challenge already solved, by doing what is basically your Option 1.
Where I couldn’t solve was showing and hiding KM’s Application Palette, which seems to only be triggerable by the menu bar icon:
