Macros - Or At Least a Single Action to Slice, Remove the Previous Chunk, and Remove the Gap

Brainstorm
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I’ve worked in a few different video editors - Blender, Shotcut, and now Kdenlive (by FAR my favorite so far!) - AND I’ve spoken with a friend who uses Davinci Resolve. NONE of these editors have a Macros feature. I do a LOT of slicing and removing pieces of my clips in my YT videos. To do one of these requires 5 steps in Kdenlive (and Shotcut was similar).

I make the start slice. Then move to the end of the chunk I want to remove, make another slice, select the chunk to remove, delete it, then delete the gap.

That is a LOT of work when you’re doing that 50+ times in a video.
I have an xdotool shell script that does it via a global hotkey - however with Wayland on the horizon (and I’ve TRIED to convert my script to ydotool, dotool, etc – NONE of them successfully) I’m VERY concerned about how painful my workflow is about to become.

I know that macros aren’t a simple ask (I’ve coded macros in a few different apps) - BUT if you offered Macro Record, Save, Playback (via hotkeys) – you would be offering something that NO other video editor is (from what I’ve seen), not even the big heavies like Davinci. And we as users could define our own workflows even in Wayland.

At the very least, it would be great to have a single command that we could assign a hotkey to that would slice the current location, delete the preceding chunk, and remove the gap that results.

Keep up the hard work! Best video editor I’ve used yet!!

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Yes, such a feature would be great. To address this shortcoming, I wrote an AutoHotkey macro. I use them.
I posted two videos about automating processes in the Kdenlive program with AutoHotkey. The videos are in Turkish. If you don’t know Turkish, you can understand them by following the steps in the video or changing the subtitle language to your own language.

video1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLjKVKWobU
video2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJl9JXIySHI

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Only if you don’t read the documentation : )

it would be great to have a single command that we could assign a hotkey to that would slice the current location, delete the preceding chunk, and remove the gap that results.

We could call it Ripple Trim to Playhead …

If you don’t like the default hotkey, see Keyboard Shortcuts — Kdenlive Manual 25.08 documentation

1 Like
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OH! Thank you for the response. You’re right I hadn’t seen that. So adding a hotkey to the ripple tool I can do it in two steps - MUCH better, and no reliance on an external ‘macro’ tool.

Thank you!

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Even without the ripple it’s a tool I use a lot, trimming ‘junk’ off the start and/or end of a clip is a really common operation. It just doesn’t close the gap, which sometimes is what you want too if you’re going to drop titles or B-roll or the like in there.