MacOS – Custom shortcut executes service twice

automatorkeyboardmacosservices

Following this answer I have created a custom service that executes a shell script that looks like this:

open -a FireFox "http://dict.cc/$1"

It works fine when I click. Then I defined a custom shortcut for it, (⇧ ⌘ L), and when I use that, the script seems to get executed twice (two tabs open, both showing the desired page). How can I fix that?

Edit: This only seems to happen when I invoce the service using the shortcut from within FireFox.

Edit 2: This gets weirder and weirder. I now created a second script for looking up stuff in Google, and bound it to the hotkey ⇧ ⌘ T. Now when I press that, it actually opens both my custom services. I have no idea why this happens.

Also, I removed both the hotkeys temporarily to check if they were used, but nothing happened when I pressed them.

Best Answer

Strange… maybe trying to rebuild your services menu (and then restarting) will help? See the top answer here:

https://superuser.com/questions/43700/snow-leopard-services-menu-says-its-building

Related Solutions

Custom keyboard shortcut not executing service

Usually this happens when there are conflicting keyboard shortcuts with other apps. Here is how I troubleshoot this type of problem.

Restart and prevent all login items from running.
Try the shortcut you’ve assigned, in this case, Option+Command+C.
If it works, that means there are other apps that prevent you from running the service.
Run the apps in login items one by one and test the shortcut until you find the conflicting apps.

Most of time it solves my problem. If it’s not conflicting keyboard shortcuts form other apps, you might use Key Codes to check the state of each key when pressed.

Automator Service that works with and without selection

I don't have an exact answer to your problem but you could perhaps consider a normal applescript that sends the COPY command and checks the contents of the clipboard before and after. Like this...

# For testing only; Delay so we can switch to the app with text
delay 2

# Clear the clipboard so we have a clean state
set the clipboard to ""


    tell application "System Events"

    # Send the 'Copy' command
    keystroke "c" using command down
    delay 0.2

    # Grub the clipboard contents
    set the_sel to the clipboard

    # Is it empty? We either failed or no selection present
    if the_sel is equal to "" then
        display dialog "No Text selected"
    else
        display dialog "Text was: " & the_sel
    end if
end tell

Best Answer

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Custom keyboard shortcut not executing service

Automator Service that works with and without selection

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