Typing the star symbol

DEVONthink
1

In the menu I see

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Does someone know how to type the star symbol, so I can refer to this menu entry using Keyboard Maestro?

The Unicode would be fine as well.

2

How about adding a keyboard shortcut to that entry using CustomShortcuts – Customize menu keyboard shortcuts ?

3

That is an option, but it would mean running yet another application. Since I already use KM a lot, I prefer that route.

4

Could be U+2605. Take a look at the "star"s in the Emoji & Symbols list of the keyboard app.

5

That makes sense. But I think the app has to be running in order to add the shortcut. It doesn’t have to run always.

6

@cgrunenberg:

There is a rogue star in the Data > Tags menu. This is in a licensed copy of Server…

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7

Unfortunately no match. It looks identical, but I guess the fact it is blue requires something extra.

8

It turns out, I had a typo in the text and I can ignore the start altogether.

9

Also, with Keyboard Maestro you can reference a menu item via regular expression and skip the :star: entirely

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10

Perhaps, off topic but how do you do that?

11

It’s actually an image and therefore shouldn’t matter.

12

And in the Ratings and Label menus. Fixed.

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13

Well, I cheated! (For comic effect) In this case it was an emoji.

There are utilities that let you search across all the characters available in your system. As @chrillek said, the “Input” menu bar item for instance has a emoji/symbol viewer that you can pull up.

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But there are enough different star characters that I’d again suggest you use Keyboard Maestro to use regext to match the menu you want.

14

I was referring to the regex you mention. I don’t know where I can find this in Keyboard Maestro.

15

It doesn’t mean “running yet another application”. CustomShortcuts makes creating hotkeys convenient. It doesn’t require it to be running.

  1. Launch it.
  2. Create your shortcut.
  3. Test the shortcut in the app you’re working in.
  4. Quit CustomShortcuts.

You’re free to run the apps you want but I personally see no benefit in using KM for this particular purpose.

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16

Thanks for the update. Appreciated.

I misunderstood initially that it was just a convenience tool that sets the shortcuts using the standard MacOS methodology. Nice to know.

17

You’re welcome and indeed it is a nicer interface over System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and also has automatic menu completion.

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PS: It’s made by Pierre Bernard, a talented developer friend of ours and a super nice person. Check out his other software at Houdah Softare.

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18

Oh, sorry I misunderstood. But it’s easy:

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This is from one of my macros. The “^” at the beginning is regex for “the start of the line”and it informs Keyboard Maestro that you want to match the menu by regex.

It’s going to select a menu item that starts with either the “Unfocus” or “Focus” + optional stuff, if any (.*) from the “View” menu.

In your case the optional stuff would be the star so your pattern might be

‘^.*Add Chat Suggestion to Documents’

See if that works.

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19

Thanks. Never too old to learn.

20

I’ve been using KM for years and have lots of shortcuts and palettes and I didn’t realise you could do that… Thanks!

It is such a brilliant program – it and Karabiner Elements are the first two things I install on any new Mac as everything is so alien without them…