The touchpad has revolutionized the way people use their devices. But too often, Mac users don’t take advantage of this powerful input hardware. It’s capable of highly sensitive, specific tasks, but users tend to treat it more or less like a big flat mouse.

Share your BetterTouchTool presets, tips & setups! Please only post here if you have a BTT preset to share, or tools to make BTT presets. If you're here to ask questions, consider the # discussion thread! I've grown accustomed to Better Touch Tool on my Macbook and would love to have something similar on PC. I've tried a few of the options on alternativeto but nothing seems to be that similar. I specifically want to be able to hover my mouse over any window and hold ALT to move it. So I decided to replicate the plugin in my Touch Bar. Borrowing heavily from the code by Martijn Smit, I created mic, camera, sharing, and leave widgets for BetterTouchTool. These can all be installed and operated by the bttstats.rb script I posted about last week. Coming from Windows, I was surprised to find out that most of the time, clicking the red X button closes the window instead of quitting an app. I decided to change that with the help of BTT. I set it up so that clicking the red X with one finger does the default action (close the window) and clicking the red X with two fingers = CMD-Q. Jun 17, 2021 If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to BetterTouchTool and many of them are available for Windows so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting Windows alternatives to BetterTouchTool are AquaSnap (Freemium), altdrag (Free, Open Source), Divvy (Paid) and Preme for Windows (Free).

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That’s where BetterTouchTool comes in handy. This powerful utility gives you total control over all of your Mac’s input devices, including a touchpad, Touch Bar, mouse, and keyboard.

How to customize Mac gestures and shortcuts

A customizer’s dream, the app serves as your personal HQ for inputs. You can configure app-specific shortcuts using up to 4 fingers, define custom gestures and actions, and set up old-fashioned hotkeys. It even supports chain actions and text replacement so you can speed up your workflow.

Say goodbye to repetitive clicking and typing. The more you get to know this tool, the less you’ll have to click. Here’s how to save yourself a lot of time.

The Mac hotkey basics

Before you start coming up with your own shortcuts, see what general features the app can offer your inputs. Click the Basic Settings tab to see your options. Click the top checkbox to have the app launch whenever you start up your Mac, and use the slider bar for your preferred device to adjust sensitivity and speed. The checkboxes at the bottom toggle window snapping and Touch Bar controls.

Create new custom gestures

To make commands of your own, first select the type of input you’re using from the menu at the top of the screen. Click Add New Gesture at the bottom of the screen. Then, use the drop-down menus to choose your preferred gesture type and action.

Come up with app-specific shortcuts

Besides general rules for your inputs, you can also create application-specific commands for any program you run on your Mac. To do so, click the + icon in the left-hand panel and choose from the list of applications. Use the gear icon to set overall conditions for that application, then create new gestures as above.

BetterTouchTool helps fine-tune the way you interact with your Mac, making your working relationship even more natural. Check it out on Setapp.

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:

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.

Better Touch Tool Dock

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:

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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:

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… and then paste it into BetterTouchTool.

(While in Keyboard Maestro, be sure to set the trigger for the macro to be a script.)

When this is all done, you can tap a button on the Touch Bar and fire any Keyboard Maestro macro you desire.

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Happy automating!

1. 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. ↩