Macro: Search the Web — Release Notes
3.3 - Feb 10 2022
Bug fixes
- Argh, the 3.2 fix caused problems elswhere, which this update hopefully resolves. Note that if you have a ws_deletes.txt file, the 'first run' macro will repair it (and make a backup first). If everything seems fine after you use the macro, you can delete the obviously-named backup file in your Websearch folder.
- Added an action timeout on the "do you want this update?" dialog to prevent possible issues if it's left onscreen for multiple hours—if it were to come onscreen while your Mac was awake but you were away for many hours. No reason to leave the dialog onscreen if you're not there to see it.
3.2 - Feb 8 2022
Bug fixes
- Somehow 3.1 was released with two missing macro calls in a routine that (thankfully) is rarely used.
- Fixed a bug in the "modify" macro that would cause some shortcuts to go missing from the list.
3.1 - Feb 6 2022
New or updated features
- Added a note in the "Start" macro that explains where to find the assigned macro trigger, for users who want to change it. (I was originally going to move the shortcut assignment to the Start macro, but that actually slowed down the appearance of the input dialog ever so slightly…speed wins!)
- The macro list is no longer force-rebuilt when you open the Shortcut Manager; it's already rebuilt any time you perform an action that modifies it, so that's enough. The Shortcut Manager opens slightly faster as a result of this change. (Speed wins!)
- The columns in the Help table are now live sortable via the arrows in each column header. (As are the tables in the List Shortcuts page.)
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug (whoops!) that prevented you from modifying an existing shortcut if you didn't change its actual shortcut. You can now do that, which was the original intent.
3.0 - Feb 2 2022
New or updated features
- A total rewrite (basically) of the macro, keeping only the input processing parts from version 2.
- All customizations are now 100% portable between updates, thanks to the new Shortcut Manager—do all customization work there, not in the macro itself. Say goodbye to user-Shortcuts, because it is gone—you no longer have to open the Keyboard Maestro editor window to modify your shortcuts.
- The new List Shortcuts page shows a full list of active and possible shortcuts, and you can leave it open for reference if you wish. In the future, it will have more powers, I hope.
- All shortcuts, including the default set, can be modified—change their shortcut, description, and even the URL.
- Easily change the default search site and the dialog style at any time.
- A locally-stored folder is used to hold your customizations—specify a location on a cloud drive, and they'll sync to all your Macs.
- Check for updates directly from the Shortcut Manager.
- The input dialog now appears nearly instantaneously, as it's stored in a variable and only updated when you use the Shortcut Manager. As all changes should be made through the manager, the list should always be current, even though it's not updated each time you activate it. (A timed action runs every six hours, though, just to make sure it's updated even if you rarely use the manager.)
Note: Version 2.7 is the final release of the 2.x series. Version 3 is coming with a totally new interface, and 100% of the shortcut management happens in the macro itself, so updating when new releases come out is a non-event. Not sure exactly when it'll be done, but it's getting close.
2.7 - Jan 25 2022
Bug fixes
- I mistakenly changed the keyboard shortcut in 2.6—sorry about that!
2.6 - Jan 25 2022
New or updated features
- This release greatly reduces the number of stock shortcuts that are active by default—from 44 down to about 20. But all the removed shortcuts, plus a bunch more, are now listed in the user-Shortcuts macro for easy inclusion in customized lists. See the First Run screen for details on how to incorporate them.
Why make this change? I doubt anyone needs 40+ active shortcuts, and that long list needs to be parsed every time you invoke the macro. Fewer items, faster macro. Additionally, it enables the next neat feature.
- As mentioned above, there is now a long list of possible shortcuts included in the user-Shortcuts macro, shown in nearly ready-to-use form. All you need to do is provide the shortcut itself, then copy and paste into your additions box, and you're done.
If you have other shortcuts that you would like to see included in the list, let me know via the email link, and I'll add them. Because they're no longer automatically active if I include them, we can create a thorough list of possible shortcuts for others to use.
- The search window now appears on the screen containing the mouse, instead of the screen containing most of the frontmost window—this seems to match better where my eyes are most of the time, and is definitely less jarring when the active window and mouse are on different screens.
- Fixed a bug that caused default searches with quotes to fail (thanks, Shoshanna!).
2.5 - Jan 15 2022
New or updated features
- You can now check for updates via a checkbox on the Help screen—check the 'check for update' box on the Help screen, then click OK. Help will vanish, but the input dialog will still be there. Dismiss it with the Escape key, and then the check for update macro will run and let you know if a new version is available.
- Replaced an AppleScript "show the file chooser window" script with the built-in Keyboard Maestro Prompt for File action.
- Hopefully resolved an issue that prevented the "first run" screen from appearing.
2.4 - Jan 14 2022
New or updated features
- Thanks to a few user suggestions, there's a new "default" search mode, where you can search your most-often-visited site without using a shortcut. There's a new setting area in user-Shortcuts where you can set which shortcut you'd like to serve as the default—it's set to DuckDuckGo (D), but you can use another shortcut (your own or provided in the macro). Just enter its shortcut in the provided box. If you'd rather not have a default, you can delete the value shown there. With the default set, you can activate the macro and then just type your search terms, instead of having to preface it with a shortcut. Note: You cannot use an alternate browser with default search; it will search using your default browser.
- The macro is now much faster at looking up matches once you press Enter after typing your shortcut and search terms—about eight times faster. And while the times involved are tiny (from .149 seconds before to .018 seconds after), there's notably less delay before the browser window appears—it feels quite snappy now.
- Added an "advanced" mode setting (in user-Shortcuts), which is FALSE by default. Set it to TRUE for a see a much smaller input dialog box with no extra text (but still with the Help button).
- The dupe check code was accidentally using an existing variable, which wound up throwing off the total count by however many user shortcuts a user had added. It now has a unique variable to use all for its own.
2.3 - Jan 9 2022
New or updated features
- A new download verification macro uses shasum values stored Github to verify that what you downloaded from my site is the same thing that I uploaded to my site. It won't be useful for this update, but when 2.4 comes out, you will be asked to verify the download when it completes. This is for your protection, in case someone manages to get into my personal site and replace the macros with malware payloads—you will be alerted before even trying to install the macro.
- The update checking macro is now much simpler. It no longer lives in any of the main macro code; instead, it's a fully standalone periodic macro. Don't want updates? Disable it. Want them more frequently? Change the interval. (But please, be nice to my server—no need to check every second!) Oh so much better than before!
- The Brave Browser option now actually works—I hadn't included it in the list of approved letters in the regex search, so it never launched. Thanks to Keyboard Maestro forum user _jims for reporting this one to me.
- Thanks to Shoshanna for this one: If you paste a multi-line input—like an address for a map—the macro will now convert it to a single line, which means it should work with most mapping URLs. Note that you won't be able to see it all in the input box, but it'll work.
- Also thanks to _jims for this idea: If you've typed something into the input box, then open help, you won't lose your typing—it will reappear when the search box reappears.
- I renamed and reorganized the macros in the group, to hopefully make it a little clearer what everything does. The two of interest to most users are the top two—the instructions and the section where you make your customizations. But also notice the new periodic section, which is the new home to the "check for updates" macro.
New or updated shortcuts
- Apparently nobody, including me, uses the Google Images [GI] or Google Maps [GM] shortcuts, as they were reversed. They're fixed now.
- There were a few http:// links in the shortcut list; they're now all https:// links.
2.2 - Jan 4 2022
New or updated features
- Fixed a potentially bad bug where if you disabled the update checker, the macro itself would stop running! Yikes! Note: Cancel Just This Macro is what you should probably use 99% of the time, not Cancel Macro. Lesson learned.
- Changed how the update checker checks to see if it's enabled. Old way was inefficient.
- Something seems to cache the release notes, and I'm not sure if it affects everyone or just me. Regardless, there's now a meaningless random number on the release notes URL (i.e it ends in ?12345 or whatever), which forces a bypass of the cache.
- The shortcut search box in the Help page will have focus when you make the Help page active—one click anywhere, then just start typing.
New or updated shortcuts
- Added eTrade stock charts [C].
2.1 - Dec 28 2021
New or updated features
Added a new live filter to the help page; just type in the box to filter the list as you type, as seen in the image at right—the search is on the description field. You can't select what you find, but you can at least easily find a shortcut you can't recall without scrolling the list.- Greatly sped up handling of user-added shortcuts—the new routine handles a 300+ entry list over 130x faster than the old method!
- Keyboard shortcuts weren't working in the update dialog; they are now.
- For those with multiple displays, the Help window should now appear on the same screen as the input dialog—hooray! (I was one of those people, and it bugged me a lot!)
- The updater should now show the proper release notes (for 2.1) when showing an update. This issue was fixed in the 2.0 release, but it took one more release to actually make it do something.
- Brave Browser [B] is now supported as a browser option, i.e. GM B Tokyo to search using Brave if it's not your default browser.
- Updated credits to fix an incorrect credit (whoops!), and to note others from the Keyboard Maestro forums who have helped me out.
- I renamed the permanent variable used to track updates; it's now called rg_Websearch_lastchecked. I tend to use "zzz" prefixes during development, and I'd forgotten to change it when I released the macro. You can remove the zzzRGwebsearch_lastchecked variable, as it's no longer needed.
New or updated shortcuts
- Added Apple Maps [AMP].
- Added Bing Translate [BT] in auto-detect to English mode.
- Added Google Translate [GT] in auto-detect to English mode.
- Added MacRumors [MR].
- Added OpenStreetMap [OSM].
- Add Stack Overflow [SO].
2.0 - Dec 27 2021
New or updated features
- Very important!! I changed the search placeholder from •SEARCH• to {SEARCH}. I've also incorporated a site description with each shortcut. Please see the (new) first-run splash screen that explains why I made these changes, and how to update your modified searches for the new format.
- Managing user-created content has been fundamentally redesigned. This content now lives in a separate "user-Shortcuts" macro that will not be updated when the main macro is updated from within the macro, so no custom content will be lost. Even if you do download the new full macro, you can easily replace the "user-Shortcuts" macro with your copy, and have all your customizations back. All user changes are now made within this macro. The help in that macro has been expanded to cover the use cases.
- You can now delete (hide, really) the macro-provided shortcuts, also in the "user-Shortcuts" macro. See the help there for the details.
- You can also change existing provided shortcuts (i.e. use GOO to search Google instead of G). Again, this is in the "user-Shortcuts" macro, and there's a how-to explaining the process.
- You can now replace an existing site's shortcut for use on a new site. That is, if you'd rather use M to search Microsoft, not Macworld, you can do that. See the "user-Shortcuts" macro for the details.
- Fixed a "doh!" mistake with the update macro: It could only show the current version's release notes, which is pretty useless to help you see what's new. Now it grabs the updated release notes from my site and displays them in a window (without any need to save them locally.)
- Added a dedicated Help button to the shortcut input dialog.
- Added shortcut symbols to the Cancel (Escape, ⎋) and OK (Return, ⏎) buttons on the shortcut input screen's buttons.
- Spent way too much time coming up with a nice help page. No more big dumb text windows, it's now a CSS-formatted HTML pop-up with a scrolling list that updates based on user modifications to the list. Also cleaned up the behavior of the help window when you're done with it, which was another challenge.
- Added more counts (total, hidden, and user created) to the shortcut input dialog, so you can track what they've done at a glance.
- The duplicate checker is now on by default, because I totally rewrote it and it's so fast it's basically unnoticeable. Still, it's flagged in the main macro (green box) if you'd like to disable it, but I recommend leaving it on, especially if you'll be adding, deleting, and changing shortcuts.
- All the overhead info—about and release notes—has moved into the new "—Start Here—" macro.
- Added macro comment blocks to the top of each macro, explaining what they do and if there's user-modifiable content in them.
- If the typed shortcut doesn't match any shortcuts in the macro, the user can now try again without relaunching macro. In prior versions, the input window would close.
- Greatly sped up the processing of the shortcut lists via some really slick multi-line regex that came from a help request on the Keyboard Maestro forums. Amazing stuff—those routines are 3.5x faster than they were before.
New or updated shortcuts
- Added apple.com search [A]. Of course, this meant we had an issue…
- Changed the "All Apple app stores search via DuckDuckGo" shortcut from [A] to [ADG], because see above.
- Added Down for Everyone or Just Me [DFE].
- Added macOS Unix man (help) pages [X]. For instance, type x zsh to see the zsh help page in a window.
- Added WordPress Plugins search [WPP], to the "user-Shortcuts" macro. I added it there to serve as an example of how to add your own shortcuts and help entries. If you don't want it, just remove it from that macro.
- Added Amazon [Z]—and an Amazon "Rob referral" [ZR]. That second version includes my affiliate link; use it if you'd like to reward me a bit for the macro when you buy something on Amazon. Feel free to remove it if you wish, of course—using the "user-Shortcuts" macro.
1.2 - Dec 22 2021
New or updated features
- Added an 'update checker' feature to alert you to and download updated versions of the macro.
- Added shortcut counter that appears in the shortcut input dialog.
New or updated shortcuts
- Added macintouch.com [MIT] to the shortcuts list.
- The macworld [M] search shortcut now searches their site directly.
1.1 - Dec 21 2021
New or updated features
- Added an optional (off by default) duplicate check to notify user of duplicate shortcuts.
- Macro and subroutine now stored in their own macro group.
- Now checks for a space character in the input for the word count check, as KM's word count filter considers "asdf;jklm" to be two words—whoops!
- Separated the version history and release notes from the introductory how-to-use comment.
New or updated shortcuts
- Added sixcolors.com [S] to the shortcuts list.
- Added youtube.com [Y] to the shortcuts list.
1.0 - Dec 20 2021
Added a new live filter to the help page; just type in the box to filter the list as you type, as seen in the image at right—the search is on the description field. You can't select what you find, but you can at least easily find a shortcut you can't recall without scrolling the list.