FEATURE REQUEST: Only trigger Keymando "listener" when certain keys are pressed

[Sean Mackesey]

I am a huge fan of Keymando and have many mappings. Mainly I use it to map key sequences (rather than carpal-tunnel inducing multi-modifier combinations) to arbitrary actions. In the past week or so, I've been on Mavericks and Keymando has not been working. I have found that typing is MUCH smoother and more responsive-- it seems that as the number of Keymando mappings I had accumulated over time, it created a slow degradation in responsiveness that was hard to notice as it occurred but cumulatively large. So now I am torn; I get a ton of mileage out of the key sequences I've mapped with Keymando, but going back to the laggy typing I was experiencing in certain contexts will be painful.

Judging by comments I've seen under reviews of keymapping software, I'm not alone in experiencing this laggy typing.  I think that the problem may be soluble, however, at least for a user like me. Essentially all of my key sequences start with one of the function keys (F1, F2, etc).  If it were possible to set the Keymando "listener", or whatever the mechanism is, to only trigger when one of these keys were pressed, might this result in much smoother typing when not using the function keys?

[Kevin Colyar]

Hey Sean,

You're not alone when you say there can be a milisecond lag at times when using keymapping software, including Keymando.  Being a keyboard junky, this can be irritating. I will say, having compared that lag between my main, four year old mbp and my brand new imac, it is very hard to pick up any lag on the newer machine.  So hopefully this issue becomes less of one in the future.

That said, this is a pretty tough problem to solve.  Due to the fact that since we want key mapping software to be able to map just about any key combination, we have to accept any key combination as input into the listener and quickly search to see if a custom mapping exists.  I suppose in the future we could provide some like a priority system (thinking off the top of my head).

One thing you could try is the "disable(application)" command.  This will completely disable Keymando's listener when that application is front-most, and should alleviate some lag for troublesome applications (Steam, VirtualBox, etc).  The application parameter can be a string or regex.

Kevin

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Sean Mackesey <s.mac...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am a huge fan of Keymando and have many mappings. Mainly I use it to map key sequences (rather than carpal-tunnel inducing multi-modifier combinations) to arbitrary actions. In the past week or so, I've been on Mavericks and Keymando has not been working. I have found that typing is MUCH smoother and more responsive-- it seems that as the number of Keymando mappings I had accumulated over time, it created a slow degradation in responsiveness that was hard to notice as it occurred but cumulatively large. So now I am torn; I get a ton of mileage out of the key sequences I've mapped with Keymando, but going back to the laggy typing I was experiencing in certain contexts will be painful.

Judging by comments I've seen under reviews of keymapping software, I'm not alone in experiencing this laggy typing.  I think that the problem may be soluble, however, at least for a user like me. Essentially all of my key sequences start with one of the function keys (F1, F2, etc).  If it were possible to set the Keymando "listener", or whatever the mechanism is, to only trigger when one of these keys were pressed, might this result in much smoother typing when not using the function keys?

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[Sean Mackesey]

Thanks for your response Kevin.  That’s good news about having less of a performance hit on new machines.  I think I’m going to be sticking with my late 2009 Macbook for a while longer though… maybe some of the Mavericks adjustments will speed things up.

Unfortunately disabling in an application won’t work for me, since one of my primary uses for Keymando is application switching and window management, which I use in essentially every application.

While I understand and agree that Keymando should be able to map just about any key combination, what I was suggesting (though I have no idea whether its technically feasible) is that there be a setting to limit which keys to listen on. For instance, I could put at the top of my keymandorc:

listen_only “<F1>”, “<F2>”

This would have the effect of making any keymappings that do not start with F1 or F2 nonfunctional, but perhaps would reduce the performance load, since no search would need to take place?  If this could be done, I feel it would alleviate a huge amount of the performance burden, which takes place when typing in text fields (where you’re not hitting F1 or F2).

Sean

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