Needs Focus Indicator

Bike Outliner
1

Not sure if I am missing something, but it seems to me that Bike needs a Focus indicator. Otherwise, no idea if part of your outline is hidden. Perhaps an elipsis at the end of the focused list, or a change in the disclosure triangle?

Enjoying Bike so far.

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2

I agree, just haven’t figured out how I want it to work yet, probably won’t figure it out until after 1.0 release, but on my list.

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Now that I’m using focus more, and sometimes restoring it from earlier sessions by script, I’m feeling a need for this too.

(Lest I lose track of content)

  • A dot – the visual equivalent of a single bit of information – somewhere ?
  • To the left of the file name ?

( In the meanwhile I can use Keyboard Maestro to put one on the menubar )

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4

As a footnote for anyone who is using Keyboard Maestro:

If you gather all your macros for Bike in one KM group, you can display an icon for that group in the macOS menu bar. (Visible only when Bike is active. Clicking it shows a menu of all your Bike macros)

kmGroupForBike

You can also specify a title for it, by assigning a KM variable name to the text to be used for that title (perhaps a single emoji character)

I’m using :black_circle: or :white_circle: by default (to be unobtrusive against dark or light macOS settings), but when the front document in Bike has a focus row (showing one row and its descendants while hiding all other rows), the lightbulb icon :bulb: is displayed in the macOS menubar instead.

The switching is automated by one of the Keyboard Maestro macros in my Bike group:

watchFocus
watchFocus522×644 73.3 KB

It runs a JavaScript snippet:

  1. Whenever a window gets the focus in Bike, and it’s also triggered
  2. whenever the keyboard focus commands ⌘⌥Right and ⌘⌥Left are used in Bike.

The triggering of focus icon update by these keystrokes is defined by a further two keyboard maestro macros.

All three are included here:
updateBikeFocusIcon.kmmacros.zip (14.2 KB)

and can be placed in your Bike macro group in Keyboard Maestro, to enable a reminder in the macOS menubar of whether or not your front Bike document is in focus mode.

Expand disclosure triangle to view JS source 
(() => {
    "use strict";

    const
        doc = Application("Bike").documents.at(0),
        tag = doc.exists() && Boolean(doc.focusedRow()) ? (
            "💡"
        ) : "⚫";

    return (
        Application("Keyboard Maestro Engine")
        .setvariable("bikeDocFocused", {to: tag}),
        tag
    );
})();
Screen recording of focus indicator

(Play button at lower right)

focusIndicator

5

Wow, nice footnote! :slight_smile:

I had no idea you could do things like that with Keyboard Maestro. Pretty nice!

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It was added in the last major update, as I made the feature request to Peter (the Keyboard Maestro developer), and he embraced it. He is one hell of a great guy.

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7

( and of course, if there was ever a need for it, you could get the focus-watcher to do things like writing out a log of focus titles and durations )