Keyboard Maestro 5 contains several new conditional actions. The “Pause Until Conditions Met” actions is modest sounding but contains a lot of power. Fundamentally, the action will pause the currently running macro and watch for a specific condition to be met. What condition? Well, pretty much anything.
I’m sure there are some very interesting ways to use this, but here’s a somewhat boring yet powerful macro for entering a footnote in Markdown on BBEdit.
When the macro is triggered, it asks for a footnote title then sets a BBEdit Jump Mark. After jumping to the bottom of the page and inserting a footnote placeholder, the macro waits. It waits for me to finish typing my footnote. When I hit return, the macro continues where it left off and executes the BBEdit “Jump Back” function which places my cursor right back where it was. Then the footnote link is inserted and I can continue typing.
To be clear, other Keyboard Maestro macros can still be run while the first macro is paused and waiting to continue. The Pause action is not pausing KM but rather just pausing the single macro. I don’t think I would let a macro sit paused for days, but certainly for normal use I have not seen any problems.
Hi Gabe,
I’m just about to improve my Markdown macros for Keyboard Maestro yours are very good!
This one here looks illogic to me. The use of “Set Jump Mark” seems unnecessary since the user defines the reference tag right at the beginning of the macro. You can just paste the tag right where the cursor is at the moment, and then jump to the end of the document.
Wouldn’t that be better?
Cheers,
Andreas
How would you get back to the original location in the document without the Jump Mark? I agree though, I could insert the link tag first and then jump to the bottom. But after that, I want to end up right back where I started. I think I need to set the jump mark then. Let me know if there is a better way. Thanks.
Very helpful. Thanks for sharing. I find KM to be very powerful, but have trouble figuring out certain workflows unless I see others examples.