

I’m happy to report that this works even if you use Bartender, so I’ve enabled the option.

You’ll also see that you can choose to display your Mac’s original menu bar items on the right side of the notch bar, which lets you preserve your menu bar apps even if you enable the notch bar.

In this window, you’ll notice that you can enable the notch bar for Macs with a notch as well as standard screens without a notch (I haven’t tried the latter option since we no longer have old MacBooks in the house). First, select the ‘Notch Bar’ section of BetterTouchTool and click ‘Notch Bar Settings’. And this is where I had an idea: what if I took advantage of the notch bar to build what is, effectively, a virtual Stream Deck featuring buttons with different colors and glyphs that I can click to run my favorite shortcuts, no matter the app I’m currently using?Īs it turns out, BetterTouchTool’s alpha version makes this very easy to do. The integration goes both ways: there are BetterTouchTool actions in Shortcuts, but you can also run shortcuts directly from BetterTouchTool as actions associated with a trigger.
#Bettertouchtool macbook for mac#
Personally, I’m not bothered by the notch on the 14” MacBook Pro I’m testing, but I’ve been intrigued by the notch bar for another reason: it’s the most effective solution I’ve found to build a system-wide, visual Shortcuts launcher that doesn’t require memorizing multiple hotkeys to run different shortcuts.Īs we covered in MacStories Selects, we believe BetterTouchTool’s deep integration with Shortcuts for Mac is the best new app feature of 2021. In my opinion, this is a more interesting and practical approach than covering up the notch with a black menu bar. With the notch bar, you can design visual triggers – giving them a custom icon powered by SF Symbols (or an image), color, and label – and “get rid” of the notch by turning it into a horizontal strip of commands that is always sitting on top of your windows. Specifically, the notch bar lets you add custom buttons that can launch any BetterTouchTool action to the left side of the menu bar, replacing an application’s default menu system. The difference is that BetterTouchTool’s notch bar turns that empty space into something useful. However, since I believe the notch bar is one of the most exciting developments in the Shortcuts for Mac ecosystem lately, and since I’m having so much fun with it, I figured it’d be worth an early hands-on preview before the end of the year.Īt a high level, the notch bar was inspired by all those utilities that let you add a black menu bar to the latest generation of MacBook Pros with a notch.
#Bettertouchtool macbook update#
This feature is currently available as an optional alpha update in BetterTouchTool, and it’s still rough around the edges, so don’t consider this short post a full review of it I’m sure we will revisit this functionality more in depth over the course of 2022. Better Touch Tool is the gateway to modern Mac customization, I wish more folks would stop bitching about the Touch Bar and get into hacking it.For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around with (and thoroughly enjoying) BetterTouchTool’s latest major feature: the notch bar. It was considered very cool and fun to personalize one's Mac. complex Safari developer shortcuts for console, responsive design view, reader viewīack in the Mac Classic and early OS X days, lots of folks got caught up in ResEdit, hot corners, Keyboard Maestro and themes and whatnot. omnipresent tools: XScope tools, 1Password, and most importantly a Terminal "visor", always available at a touch My favorite Better Touch Tool command is three-fingered trackpad swipe for "next/previous tab" (cmd-shift-) Given the trend in adding tabs to everything - even Finder - it’s odd that this isn’t simply built into the Trackpad preferences natively. If you already use four-finger-swipe for navigating between spaces, give it a try, I think you'll love it.
