Apologies if this is covered somewhere, but I couldn't find anything with a quick search of the forum. I'm trying to work out how I can use native app-specific macOS touch controls on the left-hand side of the touch bar, at the same time as having my own BTT controls on the right.
I really like the volume, weather, date and brightness buttons in GoldenChaos, and vastly prefer them to the standard Control Strip on the right-hand side of the touch bar. However, in certain apps I'd like to also be able to use the app-specific native macOS controls which appear on the left-hand side of the Touch Bar (e.g. the colour and formatting buttons in Pages), at the same time as keeping the GoldenChaos buttons on the right.
I know about the "Touch Bar behaviour" options in BTT's preferences, but these only seem to be able to either completely get rid of BTT and revert to the standard macOS controls when certain apps are open, or use BTT controls on the left while keeping the macOS Control Strip on the right (i.e. the reverse of what I want to do).
Is it possible to do this? Am I missing something really obvious?
This is not possible and can not be done with the current Touch Bar APIs.
You can however add a keyboard shortcut or other trigger and assign the predefined action "Toggle BetterTouchTool Touch Bar" to easily switch between the native and the BTT controls.
Is this going to be changed anytime soon? Or BTT versions of the standard Touch Bar widgets introduced? Not being able to use some of the native Touch Bar widgets is a dealbreaker for me.
Specifically things like the "open with" option in finder that lets me select a file, tap "open with" on the touch bar, then choose how to open the file from a list of apps displayed in the touch bar. Similar "tap then scroll to choose" widgets are available in a bunch of apps and I would like to be able to replicate them to make the Touch Bar useful.
Any update on this? I really want to be able to use BTT (and am happy to pay to use it) but if it doesn't have some of the advanced functionality that the native Touch Bar has then it's not worth it to me even a little.
What I really want in a lot of apps is the opposite of what's currently available. Instead of having the native control strip on the right and BTT stuff on the left I want a BTT control strip on the right and either the native stuff or BTT stuff on the left.
The solution I came up with for this was to create a toggle button for BTT within the BTT bar, then use the option in BTT's preferences to show the same toggle button in the standard Control Strip. This means I can flip back & forth between each of them without having to use a keyboard shortcut, which works well enough for me.
you can create a touch bar group, name it "open with" and then put multiple buttons in it, to these you can assign BTT's "open selected file with specific app" action
