- Better Touch Tool has changed TouchBar from 'kinda interesting' to 'completely necessary' for me. Better Touch Tool now allows you to create custom Touchbar shortcuts for every app you use. Basically, if you can create a BTT Macro for it (any keyboard shortcut, any menubar item, even gestures) for it, you can create a button out of it.
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- However, there is a small issue with this shortcut: if I have several apps open, no matter which app's red X I click with two fingers, the shortcut is triggered for the active app (for example, two-finger clicking the red X of the Messages app may trigger the CMD-Q shortcut in Safari, if Safari is currently active).
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In the months since Apple introduced the new MacBook Pro, with its distinctive Touch Bar display above the laptop’s keyboard, more and more developers have updated Mac apps with support for the component — from Chrome to Evernote, from documentation app Dash to Instagram client Flume.
Typically, Touch Bar integrations make it easier to do certain things in apps that you already use. That’s true of the Touch Bar features in Excel, for example.
Fixes for the Touch Bar behavior of the new M1 Macbook Pro. Improved Hyper Key responsiveness and in general better integration of the Hyper Key into other BTT functionality. Hyper Key can now execute a 'Named Trigger' in case it was not use as part of a shortcut (this allows to e.g. Trigger ESC or keep the Toggle Caps Lock functionality).
That’s all well and good. But if you’re going to spend the extra money on a laptop that has one of these doohickeys, you might as well get the most you can out of it. And, as far as I can tell, there is just one app for the Touch Bar that really makes a difference in day-to-day work. It’s called BetterTouchTool, from independent developer Andreas Hegenberg of Germany. (BetterTouchTool also lets you make custom functions for Apple’s Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and Siri Remote, and even for a Mac’s keyboard or trackpad, but I’m not going to address those capabilities here.)
The app lets you create and manage custom buttons for your Touch Bar. You can use those custom buttons in all apps, or you can set up special buttons for use only in certain apps. And each button can perform multiple functions at once if you like. If you’re not up for tinkering, you can just add canned “widgets,” including one that shows your MacBook’s estimated battery life. (Apple actually recently removed this standard-issue feature from macOS Sierra, but BetterTouchTool lets you get it back!) There are so many possible permutations — and if all the options aren’t enough, you can associate buttons with your own scripts written in AppleScript. Or you can kick off an Automator workflow.
Above: BetterTouchTool.
I personally see BetterTouchTool as a way to get right to certain places on my computer. Some buttons open specific folders. Some buttons open apps. Some buttons bring up important websites. And yes, I have a button for making screenshots just the way I like ’em.
Yes, Apple does give you a way to choose which buttons you see on the Touch Bar, including in the Control Strip on the right side. But the options will look very limited when you see what you can do with BetterTouchTool.
You can download BetterTouchTool from the app’s website and use it free for 45 days. To keep using it after that, you’ll need to buy a license, which costs as little as $5.
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Recently I upgraded my work computer to MacBook Pro 13 ” with the new touch bar. But to be totally honest I quite dislike the default customisability of the touch bar that is included in os X by default.
After a careful and in depth review of different solutions that could be use to amend that situation I stumbled upon BetterTouchTool (BTT in short), which is a great productivity enchanter in many areas such as hotkeys, gestures etc.
But personally, I am at least for the time being only interested in their TouchBar capabilities. On the picture above it’s an example snapshot of couple of my current shortcuts/workflows. You can add buttons with images, just text or both. Or widgets as well such as for example a Spotify widget that nicely enhances the experience.
On the left side you can see several ways of touch bar config. For example Global ones will persist and application specific will only popup on the bar based on the application that you have opened. In my case for IntelliJ IDEA I use debug workflow to start up the lovely debugger.
But let’s cut the chase and take a look at a specific use case.
Hippo CMS (Bloomreach experience now) is a Java based CMS System in short. and since I thought oh why not make the launching a bit simpler? So I created a relatively simple workflow with couple of steps to connect to Terminal app first.
After that as you can see in the image below I attached keyboard shortcut to go to a right tab in the Terminal application. I always have when working with this particular system, the process itself opened in first tab, therefore the shortcut will always take me from the outer most right tab which due to how i am used to terminal is always opened (if theres more than one) to move back to the first tab.
Great, now we focused on correct tab, after that we stop running process of Hippo in case it still runs from before with a simple CTRL + C shortcut.
After that we input the text through typing (one of the options under Predefined Action) to make the rebuild. Core driver download. Command itself looks something like this:
Better Touch Tool Examples Pdf
cd PATH_TO_PROJECT && mvn clean verify && mvn -P cargo.run
Lovely, everything looks nice, we send ENTER button and it triggers a nice maven clean and build itself.
Better Touch Tool Windows
A small bit of automation to save seconds at a time, one by one.