Enable Touch Bar on modifier key press

Discussion & Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I just got a new MBP 2019 16" after migrating from an earlier version. Let's just say that my initial impressions of the Touch Bar are TBD... (at best).

I'm not the best typer, but my main issue is that I just keep resting on the keys by accident and activating all kinds of stuff. Also, I feel that I just want a consistent interface so I can continue to type without having to look down at a constantly changing context.

I am a software developer, and I feel like the basic functionality I need to remain productive is this feature set:

  1. To be able to configure buttons in the Touch Bar using BTT as usual
  2. For these buttons to be visible at all times but only activate when both the Ctrl and Option buttons are pressed and be disabled otherwise.
  3. When I press Fn, the function keys appear
  4. When any action is triggered, I get some haptic feedback.

I have got everything working except for feature #2. I can use the modifier keys option to show some button when pressed, but I want to always see it there so I don't have to press the button and then wait for it to appear. Any ideas how to achieve this?

Feels like I am after the functionality that Bar None claims to provide. BTT is extremely powerful so seemed to me like I should be able to replicate that here.

Thank you for any help!

2

I know this solution is a little inelegant... but what about setting up conditional rules so that what's usually there are all the icons, but they aren't actually tied to pressing anything and then setting up a duplicate touch bar that has actions attached to the icons that is only there when you are pressing whatever keys you want?