Alpha v. Keyboard Maestro

[David C. <da...@pa...>]

I have been experiencing an issue that I’m not entirely clear on how to diagnose.

I only recently acquired a new Mac with Big Sur installed, replacing a 12-year old Mac Pro.  For many years I had relied on QuicKeys for many macro tasks.  As QuicKeys is long dead, I have returned after many years to Keyboard Maestro, which I had relied on prior to making the move to QuicKeys.  

One set of personal KM macros I use frequently wrap text on the clipboard in HTML/CSS tags.  For example, one macro takes a URL on the clipboard and turns it into a list item:

http://url.org <http://url.org/>     --->    <LI><A HREF=“http://url.org <http://url.org/>“></A>

in a super-simple manner:

Insert text  <LI><A HREF=“
Paste from the clipboard
Insert text  “></A>

This works fine in other text editors I sometimes use (including TextEdit and BBEdit), but in Alpha quite frequently (25-35% of the time) the inserted text is slightly garbled, with characters in the inserted text out of order from what’s specified in the macro, or occasionally just missing.  For example, instead of "<LI><A HREF=“ what will appear is "<LI<>A HREF=“ or "<LI<A HREF=“ or "<LI<>A HREF=“ and similarly “></A> might become "“></>A” or ““<>/A>” or whatever.  It’s not consistent, and I can invoke the same macro 20 times in a row and get 15 instances that are what they’re supposed to be and another 5 randomly mixed in with characters swapped around,, or occasionally dropped.

I’m posting to this list because as noted I DON’T see this behavior when I invoke the same macro in other editors.  I’m guessing it’s something to do with the inserted text being inserted too quickly, or something of that nature?

I tried to fool around with pauses in the macro and so forth, to no avail.  I’m also posting to the Keyboard Maestro forums, but thought I would put this out there here as well to see if anyone had any ideas I could try from the Alpha side of things.

Thanks,
David Craig

PS.  I had an equivalent QuicKeys macro that I used with Alpha for many years with no issues … but that was on a different machine, several operating systems behind where we are now, and an older version of Alpha.  Not to mention with different macro software...


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