BTT hyperkey not working well with arrow keys

Discussion & Questions
1

I've recently switched from Karabiner Elements to Better Touch Tool to activate the hyperkey.

But the BTT hyperkey isn't working well with the arrow keys.

I use those combinations in Obsidian and OmniFocus to trigger each app's keyboard shortcuts that move items up and down, and to indent and outdent them.

With BTT's hyperkey in OmniFocus, the selection moves, but not the item.

In Obsidian, hyperkey-up arrow doesn’t move the line the cursor is in, but rather moves the next item above it. Hyperkey-down arrow results in a system error beep and moves the next item below it. Hyperkey-left and -right arrows indent and outdent as expected, but also give a system error beep.

In BTT's settings, I found a bunch of sample (global) keyboard shortcuts, listed below the Caps Lock hyperkey item and disabled them all so they wouldn’t interfere with my own keyboard shortcuts in apps or Keyboard Maestro. Two of them were "kmtrigger://macro=Move%20down" and "kmtrigger://macro=Move%20up". I don’t know what those are for, but they’re disabled.

Any idea why BTT's hyperkey isn't working smoothly with the arrow keys?

2

I found the old threads on this issue and am able to deal with this now.

(Curiously using the forum search for "hyperkey" and "arrow keys" found nothing. But a Google search found it inside the forum.)

3

I believe I'm having similar issue to you. There seems to be some behaviour difference between mapping the hyper key with the arrow keys versus a regular key. What was the solution? Can you provide a link?

4

Sorry for the delay. I was on the road.

Someone on the BTT forum suggested using the right control key, since BTT can discern between the left and right Control keys. So, in my Mac's system preferences, keyboard, modifier keys, I set "caps lock" to "control". BTT sees this as the right control key. So I decided to use that instead of its hyperkey.

In BTT, I use this right Ctrl key for global hotkeys.

  • Use BTT to call Keyboard Maestro macros via URL scheme
  • Or execute directly from BTT if KM isn't required for its capabilities.

An update:

While traveling without Internet access last November, I found Setapp (which was providing BTT) was unreliable without Internet, causing BTT to fail, so I abandoned using BTT for the hyperkey.

I know I could just buy BTT outright, but I'm getting overwhelmed remembering all the keyboard shortcuts and decided against using the hyperkey to create even more of them. So, I've abandoned the hyperkey all together, deciding to use keyboard shortcuts for things I do often enough to memorize naturally, and use Stream deck buttons and Keyboard Maestro conflict pallets for the much larger set of commands and macros that I only use occasionally.

Sometimes simplification is more productive! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Russell

5

Thanks for the reply. Greatly appreciated. I'll definitely look into using the 'right control' trick.