Allow longer "Max pause between keystrokes" for key sequences, don't allow 0 seconds

Feature Requests
1

This is somewhere between an “unexpected behavior” report and a feature request...

The key sequence setting “Max pause between keystrokes” can be set between 0 and 2 seconds. This causes two issues:

  1. 2 seconds is too short for some uses, making sequence recognition fail.
  2. 0 seconds necessarily causes recognition to fail because it is impossible to sequentially type with a 0-second pause.

1 is an issue for me with text replacements. I often pause typing for longer than 2 seconds before completing a sequence. For example, I use sequences like 1//2 as shortcuts to type fractions in the ¹⁄₂ format, but that sometimes fails because, having already typed x//, I’m still pondering the last digit to type.

So my suggestion would be to allow longer max values, and to not allow 0 seconds. Alternatively, 0 seconds could act as “disabled”, i.e. any pause would be allowed. If technical reasons preclude arbitrary pause lengths, 5 seconds would already go a long way to reduce failed recognitions, I think.

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: 2024 MBP M4 Pro
  • macOS version: 15.6.1
  • BetterTouchTool version: 5.649
2

You can enter the value manually. Then click anywhere outside before saving.

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Exactly, that's why nobody does it. The default value is set to 0.3 s.:slightly_smiling_face:

3

Ha! Indeed. I tried that before posting and it didn’t work (wouldn’t take any input). Probably sequence recording was still active and I didn’t notice because the list was overflowing.

(I’ve always found it annoying that recording is active upon opening that window even when there is already a sequence. So change my feature request to “Don’t auto-enable key sequence recording when a sequence is already present”, if you will. ;-))

Not a fan of allowing configuration options that can only break things. Sooner or later someone does do it. ;-} But anyway, not my problem.

Thanks!

1 Like
4

I think that is a good idea!

2 Likes