Fun with Palettes!
MacSparky really nailed it with this new video field guide. I’ve been using Keyboard Maestro for years, and I’d never figured out half this stuff. I’m especially stoked about palettes. Wow. I finally get it.
Still, it’s frustrating to have to use the mouse to select items on the Global Macro Palette. (***Feature request?***) Someone on the Keyboard Maestro forum had the same question: How do I get Group Palette key response behavior to imitate Conflict Palette?. You can follow that link for more on this (with some terrific videos that happen to be in German), but the upshot seems to be this…
Never use the Global Macro Palette.
Instead, assign the hotkey that you would use for the Global Macro Palette (in MacSparky’s case, F20; for me it’s hyperkey-A = “⇧⌘⌥⌃A”) to all of the items (including palettes) that you want to include in your globally available Über-palette of macros. This generates a Conflict Palette, which means that you can type the highlighted characters to launch a specific action or palette. This way, your hands never have to leave the keyboard.
For bonus points, you can use fixate the order of the items on a palette by starting a line with a number followed by closed parentheses, like this: 01)Primary macro (which then appears as “Primary Macro”.)
Here’s an example (just for illustration, it’s not particularly useful). It shows how you can make items appear out of alphabetical order (with the numbers at the beginning) and how you can add a character at the beginning, to make it the hotkey that appears in my iTunes Palette.
This is a screenshot from the Keyboard Maestro Editor:
And this is what it looks like once the palette is activated:
Hope this is useful.