AdKey — Keybinds for your ads

Meta Ads Manager gives you a fixed list of date ranges. When the window you actually work with is not on that list, you build it by hand every time: open the date picker, click today, count backwards to the start day, and hit Update. AdKey puts that window on a button. It is a small bar that lives inside the ads panel, and you drag it wherever you want. Every button on it carries a date range you defined and a key you chose. Click the button, or press the key, and the panel switches to that range and refreshes on its own. The page is never reloaded. WHAT IS THERE THE MINUTE YOU INSTALL IT Four buttons, already set up: Today (key h), 2 days (key 2), 3 days (key 3) and 7 days (key 7). All four are rolling windows that END TODAY, so you can read them one after another as a trend instead of correcting for the calendar in your head. If you prefer the panel's convention, every button has an "End yesterday" switch of its own. The panel's own ranges are still one click away in its own picker, and they can be added as buttons from the editor if you want them on the bar too. HOW TO USE IT 1. Install it and open Ads Manager. The bar appears at the bottom left. 2. Click a button. Or press the trigger key and then the button's key: d, then 3. 3. Drag the bar by its handle to wherever it does not bother you. It stays there. 4. Open the gear on the bar - the one whose tooltip reads "Settings: ranges, keys and appearance" - to add, edit, reorder and delete buttons, to change the trigger key, and to change the bar's size and colour. The toolbar icon has three controls and nothing else: "Extension on", "Show the bar" and "Language". The buttons are not configured there, on purpose: the popup closes on every click outside it, which makes it the worst possible place for a form with a preview. BUILDING A BUTTON Five kinds of range: - Panel range - one of the panel's own ranges. AdKey offers the list it detected in your ad account; when it cannot read one, it falls back to these twelve: today, yesterday, last 2 days, last 7, 14, 28 or 30 days, this week, last week, this month, last month, maximum. - Last N days - a rolling window ending today, or ending yesterday if you say so. - N days ending before today - the same window pushed back, for "the three days before yesterday". - Fixed dates - a from and a to that never move with the calendar. - Month or week - this month, last month, this week or last week. A window can span up to 730 days. Eight buttons fit on the bar; a ninth still fires from the keyboard and is listed in the editor, it is just not drawn - past eight it stops being a bar and starts covering your panel. THE KEYBOARD - One trigger key, and you choose it. Out of the box it is d. Press it, then the button's key: d, then 3. - The armed sequence lasts a second and a half and then drops on its own. - A button can carry a combination with modifiers instead, and that one fires on its own, without the trigger key. - With the cursor in a text field, NOTHING happens. The sequence does not arm, no shortcut fires, not even one with modifiers. The panel's search box stays yours. - The panel's own shortcuts are never swallowed - Alt+1, Alt+2, Alt+3, Ctrl/Cmd+D, Ctrl/Cmd+C, Ctrl/Cmd+V, Ctrl/Cmd+Y, Ctrl/Cmd+U - even if one of them somehow ended up assigned to a button. - Keys the browser keeps for itself are refused when you try to assign them, and you are told which and why. That is why Ctrl+3 cannot be used even though a button is called "3 days". - If two buttons end up on the same key, the first one in the bar's order wins and you are told. The other button is not lost: it just has no key until you give it one. THE BAR - Drag it by its handle. It remembers where you left it, and it cannot be dragged off screen. - Three sizes: small, normal, large. - Pick its colour in hex. Whatever you pick, AdKey chooses the text colour that clears 4.5:1 contrast against it, so the labels stay readable. That is not a promise from a designer's eye: it is checked in the test suite against all 4,096 three-digit colours. - It reads whether the background behind it is light or dark and adapts, and it looks again when you drop it somewhere else. - It sits above the panel but deliberately not at the very top of the stack, so it cannot cover a dialog of Meta's own. - The ✕ hides it, and it asks once before doing it, because that button hides the only place from which it can be undone. Bring it back from the toolbar icon: "Show the bar". With the bar hidden, the keyboard shortcuts keep working. DATES THAT ARE ACTUALLY YOUR ACCOUNT'S DATES - "Today" means today in your ad account's time zone, not your computer's. AdKey reads that time zone from data the page has already loaded. - If it cannot read it, it falls back to this computer's clock and SAYS SO, right on the bar. A quiet fallback would be worse than none: the range would be a day off and nobody would know. - The same goes for the start of the week: it detects whether your account's weeks start on Sunday or on Monday, because sending the wrong one returns the wrong week with no error at all. - Nothing is written to the address bar without being validated first. A malformed range breaks the panel's screen, and the only way out of that is a reload. - After writing, AdKey checks whether the panel actually moved. It has three answers, and one of them is "I cannot tell" - it says that instead of claiming a change it did not verify. - If "Compare" is on in a mode that has not been verified, AdKey refuses to touch anything and explains why. A guessed comparison range would show believable numbers that are wrong, which is worse than doing nothing. TAKING YOUR BUTTONS TO ANOTHER COMPUTER "Take to another PC" writes your buttons to a file. Open that file from the same button on the other machine. There is no sync and that is deliberate - see the DATA section. A button in the file that is not understood is dropped on its own, with its reason, and the rest com…