Selecting items from a popup menu

By Peter N Lewis on Thursday, February 5, 2009

Something that is relatively tricky to do in Keyboard Maestro is to select menu items from a popup menu. The typical hackish solution is to simulate a click in the menu, followed by simulated keystrokes to select the desired menu item (Insert Text by Typing works well for this), followed by simulating the return key to select the item (or right arrow to drill down into hierarchical menus).

A neat solution is inspired from a MarsEdit tip (in turn inspired by a Macworld tip) which describes how to use the Keyboard & Mouse System Preference to assign key equivalents to any menu in an application, including popup menus. Once you assign a key equivalent it is then a trivial macro action to simulate that keyboard equivalent.

Thanks to Brent Simmons for the post, and also to Rob Griffiths for the original inspiration.

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Selecting items from a popup menu

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