You could fix that today with this week’s sponsor, BetterTouchTool. My Touch Bar gives me the current date and time, the current temperature (and daily high and low), and a list of my upcoming appointments. I like to think of it as my “Informational Touch Bar” and it was easy to set up with BetterTouchTool. Decide whether you want to show your Touch Bar button globally or just for one specific application. Select accordingly in the application list on the very left of the BTT Configuration. Click the 'Add TouchBar' button in the TouchBar tab Enter a name (that's required for it to show up in the Touch Bar). BetterTouchTool Touch Bar Presets Here we collect cool touch bar presets for BetterTouchTool. Feel free to send your own configs in pull-requests. Do not forget to attach a screenshot (⇧⌘6) and write some description to this README. Jan 17, 2018 BetterTouchTool offers a way to answer a lot of the Touch Bar’s most glaring deficiencies. This isn’t its only function, it’s actually a full on suite that let’s you customize virtually any interface on a Mac: mouse, keyboard, trackpad, even the Apple TV Siri remote.
Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.
A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.
The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.
For example, if I press the button with the MPU logo, it opens these pages:
- MPU episode schedule
- Folder of MPU Outlines
- The MPU page in Relay’s ad-tracking system
- The MPU page in the Relay FM CMS
I’m doing this via with Keyboard Maestro, another incredibly flexible tool. Here’s what that looks like, with my secret URLs redacted:
![Hide Hide](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1-6UwKM9Tng/maxresdefault.jpg)
As you can see, on my Mac Pro, this is triggered by a specific button my Stream Deck, as pictured above.1
To re-use these macros on my MacBook Pro, I made a copy of them in Keyboard Maestro, which I have sync its data over Dropbox.
I then fired up BetterTouchTool, which among many other things, allows you to create custom UI elements on your notebook’s Touchbar, tying them to a wide range of actions. Turns out, you can even have BetterTouchTool become a trigger for Keyboard Maestro.
First, create a button in the Touch Bar section of BetterTouchTool, or a group that you can place buttons in, like I have:
The action you need to use is named “Execute Terminal Command (Async, non-blocking),” which makes the button fire off a script. Here’s the script itself:
osascript -e 'tell application 'Keyboard Maestro Engine' to do script 'PLACEHOLDER'
Where I have that placeholder text, you’ll need to paste in the UUID of the Keyboard Maestro macro you want to execute. To get that, you will need to select “Copy as UUID” in Keyboard Maestro:
… and then paste it into BetterTouchTool.
(While in Keyboard Maestro, be sure to set the trigger for the macro to be a script.)
![Bettertouchtool Touch Bar Bettertouchtool Touch Bar](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Apple-MacBook-Pro-BetterTouchTool-Novet.jpg?fit=2048%2C1536&strip=all)
When this is all done, you can tap a button on the Touch Bar and fire any Keyboard Maestro macro you desire.
Happy automating!
- The non-show buttons control various lights in my office and control media playback on the computer. The Migration Assistant icon launches my normal set of apps after a reboot. ↩
BetterTouchTool let's you completely customize your Touch Bar.
People have shared awesome BetterTouchTool Touch Bar setups on our community platform, so definitely have a look there:
Known Limitations
Bettertouchtool Touch Bar Not Showing
- The only way to get rid of the x icon on the left side of the Touch Bar is to disable 'Show macOS Control Strip' in the General Touch Bar settings in BTT
- When hiding the Touch Bar with the x button on the left, it will require tapping the BTT icon in the Control Strip twice to get it back.
- You can not partially customize an app's Touch Bar. You can only replace it completely using BTT:
Adding New TouchBar Buttons
- Decide whether you want to show your Touch Bar button globally or just for one specific application. Select accordingly in the application list on the very left of the BTT Configuration.
- Click the 'Add TouchBar' button in the TouchBar tab
- Enter a name (that's required for it to show up in the Touch Bar)
- Assign any action or shortcut you want.
Customizing the Touch Bar Button Appearance
- All customization is done in the configuration side-bar on the right (you can undock it like in this screenshot if you want to):
Bettertouchtool Touch Bar Spotify
App Specific Configuration
- For any app you can choose whether you want to show the BTT Touch Bar or rather show the app's default bar.
General Settings
- You can decide if you want to show the Control Strip on the right side of the Touch Bar, or if you want to have more space available for your buttons and don't show it. (Hint: you can configure your Control Strip in System Preferences => Keyboard => Customize Control Strip)
- You can decide whether to show the BetterTouchTool icon in the Control Strip. (If you don't show it, you have to use the predefined action 'Toggle BetterTouchTool Touch Bar' to show or hide the BTT Touch Bar.)
- You can decide whether you want to Show the global actions also if app-specific actions are available. Hint: by long pressing the BTT icon you can force it to only show the global actions regardless of this setting.