Customize Your Mac’s Touchpad With BetterTouchTool
Mac: If you’re fancy enough to have a MacBook with a touch bar and don’t hate Apple replacing your physical keys with virtual ones (perhaps a blessing given the quality of the former ), you may have already tried to customize it. very little. You may have swapped one or two of the virtual buttons on the control strip, or decided to ditch the application-specific tweaks you might get in favor of permanent function keys – like in the old days.
While you’re limited to a small set of settings by default on macOS, there is a lot more you can do with the Touch Bar. (I’m a fan of peeking into Nyan Cat myself, but that will probably drive you crazy in a few minutes.)
Try the BetterTouchTool app instead , which gives you complete control over the Touch Bar. (And thanks to reader Lifehacker jsimon for pointing this out!)
Before I get to the appendix, a short word: it costs $ 6.50. I usually like to find free alternatives when possible, but BetterTouchTool is so good that it’s worth spending some money. Plus, it comes with a generous 45-day trial, so you’ll have plenty of time to figure out if it’s the right one for you before paying the paltry fee for the full version.
So what can BetterTouchTool do?
I’m glad I asked. Once you’ve downloaded, unzipped and installed the app (just double-click it and follow the instructions that will put it in the Applications folder and give it access to your system’s accessibility APIs). When you get to the application settings screen, simply tap on the “TouchBar” section at the top of the navigation.
From there, it’s easy to create new buttons for the Touch Bar. Simply select which application they should apply to – “Global” for “anytime” or the specific application running on your system – and click the “+ TouchBar Button” at the bottom of the “Preferences” window. Assign a keyboard shortcut or other action to the button and … done. That’s all you have to do.
You can also assign widgets to the touchpad – for example, the remaining battery power of your laptop or the system clock – and customize what is displayed for each program. Adding self-created buttons will degrade the default options that any application comes with, and you can’t just “import” buttons that, say, are displayed whenever you open Chrome. You will have to recreate them when you set up new buttons for your application.
Be sure to check the BetterTouchTool settings, which are located under the General TouchPad Settings button in the upper right corner of the window, which will allow you to decide if you want to see the control bar at all (or when) and if you want to prioritize global actions over the ones you create. actions for specific applications to name a few options.
You can also set even more preferences for each app by clicking the slightly more hidden App-Specific drop-down button in the left-most sidebar.
BetterTouchTool may seem a little overwhelming at first, as your imagination really is the limit of what you can do. You can also just download other people’s configurations for specific applications if they are willing to share (or if you find something interesting on the official BetterTouchTool community page ). If you’d rather hunt for them or create your own config, I’ll leave that up to you.