QuicKeys and script activation
QuicKeys and script activation
- Subject: QuicKeys and script activation
- From: Roy McCoy <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:49:11 +0200
I'll now broach the subject of QuicKeys rather than "broaching"
the hierarchy in AppleScript (breaching, oops).
I don't know absolutely for sure, but I've often had the impression
that a lot of people use scripting generally for big operations
that aren't done many times but that need to be automated, and that
these users are thus not particularly concerned with how their scripts
are zactivated. A script menu seems to be fine for them, or even
Script Editor. I've never found this to be acceptable myself, however,
and if I've made any contribution to the Mac/scripting world I think
it was staying on CE Software's back until they finally made QuicKeys
work properly with AppleScript. I'd started off - this was twenty years
ago, now - with the Tempo series of macro programs, which was reputed
to be the Rolls Royce of the genre and did have some nice features,
but I soon started running QuicKeys alongside it and wound up dumping
Tempo altogether. I guess I wasn't perfectly satisfied with QuicKeys
(which for a long time didn't work with AppleScript, as indicated
above), since I bought another macro program called OneClick and
tried that one out for a while. But I soon gravitated back to QuicKeys
and wound up with thousands of routines, little and big, hundreds of
which I used constantly.
This multitude of QuicKeys routines was perhaps the main reason
I stuck with OS 9 as long as I did, moving to OS X on a new Mac only
last year. One of the great things about this way of doing things was
an apparently little- known trick I learned from Ray Robertson, whereby
you could use the QK message function to capture the name of a macro
(or shortcut, as they came to be called) and run it. The modus operandi
was thus: keycode to activate message window (I used the help key),
name of shortcut (e.g. "h.o", hyphenation on), and return. The OS X
version of QK was only a pale version of its former self (which is true
despite the fact that I didn't want to have to redo all those routines
anyway), and so I stuck with the old setup for a long time. I finally
had to have Unicode and a working Internet browser, however, so
eventually I got a new Mac and started using QK with it too, though
it still didn't seem anywhere near as good as before.
But enough of this chitchat already. Aside from throwing in another
mention of the new abbreviations feature in the new version of QK
(the featre being in at least one way better than the message-window
method in the old QK, in that an initiating key is no longer necessary,
just one following the typing of the abbreviation - I'm also dispensing
with the previous periods, thus "ho" rather than "h.o" for example),
I just want to ask what anybody may have to say about the current
QuicKeys version, and what anybody may have to recommend for script
activation as an alternative. I know I can assign keycodes to scripts
with InDesign, but these assignments have shown themselves to be too
volatile in my experience, and so I'm triggering all my InDesign scripts
with QuicKeys so as not to have to keep reassigning them every time
something changes on my disk.
Thanks,
Roy McCoy
Rotterdam, NL
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