I 😍 the TouchBar

iPersuade · July 16, 2018, 12:18am

If someone has one for Vim or MacVim, I’d be most interested to see it.

dustinknopoff · July 16, 2018, 1:32am

@iPersuade Unfortunately, from the user end, the touch bar is limited by what BetterTouchTool offers and what the developer makes available. I’ve never used MacVim but I don’t think it would be possible for vim to include that functionality. So, that means only functionality you can create is with Shell/Apple Scripts and Window positioning is possible. Potentially, a kind of home-brewed tmux would be possible. Beyond that maybe key things that are typed often as buttons?

iPersuade · July 16, 2018, 6:51am

Thanks. That’s helpful. As long as I can make the Esc key persistent, that would solve my biggest concern. Anything beyond that would be gravy.

dustinknopoff · July 16, 2018, 11:56am

@iPersuade the Esc key is persistent but harder to feel without looking down at the keyboard first. A lot of people have remapped esc to the caps lock key to get around this.

dustinknopoff · July 16, 2018, 4:09pm

Just finished making my Global Touch Bar in BTT.

I’ve got space switchers, quick open my Terminal of choice, quick press to play my favorite playlist in iTunes and show the current song playing in iTunes which when pressed skips the song.

iPersuade · July 16, 2018, 5:01pm

Thanks, @dustinknopoff!

Centris650 · July 16, 2018, 6:19pm

Great choice in music!

GraemeS · July 17, 2018, 12:41am

That’s a neat idea with the current song/skip button. I wonder if it’s possible to make it an icon only showing the current cover art, to save space…looking at BTT it seems possible with a widget, I just can’t figure it out yet.

dustinknopoff · July 17, 2018, 3:08am

@GraemeS Going to try and get it to be the album artwork tomorrow. I imagine it involves the update_touch_bar_widget call seen here

GraemeS · July 17, 2018, 4:52am

I don’t know the best method, but I tried following these notes that are in the Advanced Configuration window for Touchbar widgets:

Blockquote
In the script you can either return a simple string which will then be shown on the widget, or you can return a JSON string like this (must be escaped):
“{"text":"newTitle",
"icon_data": "base64_icon_data",
"icon_path":"path_to_new_icon",
"background_color": "255,85,100,255"}”

I got the title updating, but couldn’t get the artwork for some reason, maybe because it wasn’t base64? No idea.
I gave up, anyway, as it took me a while to get that far, and then I felt lost!

dfay · July 17, 2018, 10:25am

I’ve added a button to all of my BTT configs on the R end to toggle between the app-specific TouchBar and the BTT global. Here’s the JSON:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/derickfay/7fa4bec4b079e378d1ecc7517406d08d

bttGlobal.json

{
  "BTTTouchBarButtonName" : "Global",
  "BTTTriggerType" : 629,
  "BTTTriggerClass" : "BTTTriggerTypeTouchBar",
  "BTTPredefinedActionType" : 190,
  "BTTPredefinedActionName" : "Force Show\/Hide Global BTT Touch Bar Actions",
  "BTTEnabled2" : 1,
  "BTTUUID" : "937923F9-24F3-4AD7-883F-7DE9E2D3FA30",
  "BTTEnabled" : 1,
  "BTTOrder" : 5,

This file has been truncated. show original

(Just realised one can share BTT buttons easily by copying / pasting the JSON - )

dustinknopoff · July 20, 2018, 4:08pm

@GraemeS I had no idea BetterTouchTool has a forum as well! Found this. It’s exactly what we were looking for. Title, Artist and Album Artwork as icon. It crashed my BTT when doing direct import to BTT but downloading the JSON and opening it worked perfectly.

dfay · July 20, 2018, 5:48pm

Has anyone got update_touch_bar_widget working in BTT AppleScript? I would like to dim buttons that aren’t active in my Skim touchbar posted at the top of this threat, but the script command doesn’t seem to actually work (when called from either BTT or Script Editor). Just posted in BTT forums as well.

Update: the solution was to use “update_trigger” and escape all the JSON, like so:

	update_trigger "701399EC-B9BF-472D-8A3E-4F9FB5F01F75" json "{\"BTTTriggerConfig\":{\"BTTTouchBarButtonColor\" : \"0,0,0,20\"}}"

Evan · July 22, 2018, 2:10am

I don’t use the Touch Bar as much as I once did (see below), but one usage for me is to answer and end calls. When I’m out of the office I can still make calls, using my office phone number, via our VOIP app on my MacBook. If the receptionist calls me, I used to try to quickly switch to the app, find the “answer” button, and click on it. I’ve now set up a Keyboard Maestro macro, mapped to the Touch Bar via BetterTouchTool, to do that for me. I have another I can tap to end calls.

The lack of a separate keyboard with Touch Bar support has significant reduced my Touch Bar usage on my MacBook. The main usage for me on the MacBook was to address “keyboard shortcut overload.” I would make some buttons so I didn’t have to remember new shortcuts. But since I couldn’t carry that over to the iMac during the day, I stopped using most of them. One example of that is Markdown bold and italics. I had a button that would take selected text and surround it with the correct Markdown syntax. I eventually just forced myself to learn another keyboard shortcut, though, so I could work the same way on my iMac.

dfay · August 7, 2018, 7:12pm

Taskpaper

This is optimised for organising – you can keep your right hand on the arrow keys and use your left hand to move items up/down and change their type. You can also use your left pinky to tab and your left pinky and right ring finger on shift to back tab. Sounds awkward but very fluid in practice.

Doty · August 10, 2018, 10:15pm

I’m in love with my touch bar now that I’ve added a workflow button to it to save PDF files to DevonThink! Full post here: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/devonthink-help/6180/43?u=doty

Doty · September 1, 2018, 10:56pm

It has always bothered me that ScanSnap Manager doesn’t automatically save when using “scan to folder” by hitting the return button. Today, I used BetterTouchTool to map the “save” button so every time I’m using my ix500 I have a button that pops up on the touchbar that says Save PDF. When I’m scanning a lot of files, it’s great not not have to mouse over to the save button and click it. It is close enough to the keyboard that it’s almost as good as hitting enter!

dfay · September 3, 2018, 4:09pm

posted my Skim preset:

ptgn123 · September 5, 2018, 5:47am

Marco Arment likes to complain. He complains about macOS or iOS bugs, yet Overcast has had a bug with CarPlay since day one. Never been fixed. The touchbar is useful if you actually use it and how well the developer implements the controls.