Apps Bar -- Fixed icons (instead of moving)

Heya! Love Aquatouch, but I have a suggestion/request.

I use the App Bar section a lot. I find it very useful to switch between apps. But I don't like that it always puts the most recent app first. This means that if I'm switching quickly between apps they are always moving around and I consistently hit the wrong one.

It would be great if the app icons mirrored what is on the dock and stay fixed. I put my icons in a specific order for easy workflow. If that were mirrored in the app bar it would greatly improve usability for me.

Is this doable?

Thanks!

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Ok, here is how to achieve this (maybe the dev @yuuiko has a better hint as I, but that's the only hack I found as I'm not a AQT user - also, I'm doing this on AQT v3.5.6, there shouldn't be any changes to 3.5.8):

  1. Open BTT Preferences
  2. Make sure you are in the Touch Bar section :slight_smile:
  3. Go to •Expanded Widgets on the left
  4. You'll find a folder called Quick Apps here, double click it to open it up
  5. In this folder, you find an App Switcher Widget (10th element or so), the one without ⌘ in front!
  6. Select it, then hit ⌘C, and ⌘V - this should duplicate the widget.
  7. Select the original one, hit ⌘D to hide it (we won't delete it in case we need it later - you never know)
  8. Go back to the duplicate you just created. Select it, and change it to "Dock Widget" (to do so, click on the App Switcher Widget dropdown menu on the top right of the window and search for "Dock")
  9. Set the width of the Dock Widget to 360
  10. Maybe click Hide running indicator if you want to. If not, keep it.

And because I know that all this can be quite confusing, fond attached a video where I recorded how to perform this.
Et voilà.
Now you'll see your dock as it is on the left of the group, right where your running apps have been before.
If you want to display only your running apps, check also Hide Quit Apps and Hide Folders.
Hope this helped!


If you also use the quit feature, duplicate the App Switcher Widget with the ⌘ in front of it (should be 9th element or so), hide one of them, set the width to 815 and hide everything but the running apps.

Hope this makes you day! :wink:

@gregk

Should be possible to make a setting for it.
Added to to-do list!

I'm quite busy though so new updates might take a while

Thank you! I will definitely give this a try!

Cheers!
~g

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Thank you! Looking forward to the new addition. In the meantime i'll try Caliguvara's technique.

Cheers!
~g

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Heya Caliguvara. I just made the update and it works like a charm!

I made the dock widget about 450px to give me a bit more room. Very nice.

Question: the buttons on next part of the bar (Finder New Plaintext, New sticky) don't work correctly. They don't launch the apps. If the app is launched it sometimes duplicates the open app. It seems like it is doing the cmd-N, but not actually doing the first action of launching the app. Any ideas?

Thanks!

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Hey Caliguvara and Yuuiko,

I got the quick apps bar to work like caliguvara suggested. Perfect.

Also, I fixed the problem with the launchers. I just had to remap each one of them and now they work.

Thanks!
~g

1 Like

Glad to hear you managed to make your preset perfect for you! Enjoy! :slightly_smiling_face: