Hi Community,
Hi Andreas,
the following UseCase sounds very simple/basic - but meanwhile I spend several hours without making it work probably. I followed various discussions in the forum (see below for reference) without luck so far.
So I decided to ask for your help and guidance.
WHAT I want to achieve
- I want to have a keyboard shortcut (e.g. CMD + F13) send as long as one of the buttons of my mouse is pressed
- I am not stick to this specific shortcut, it just needs to be one that is unused by the system
HOW have I tried to achieve it (so far)
First Try
First I tried to achieve this with two triggers:
- MouseButton down triggers shortcut down
- MouseButton Up triggers shortcut up
First Try.bttpreset (1.6 KB)
Second Try
- Same as First Try but with the shortcut "CTRL+OPT+CMD+SPACE"
- Same behavior as with the First Try
Second Try.bttpreset (1.7 KB)
Third Try
- Similar to First and Second Try
- But with all the modifier keys set separately
Third Try.bttpreset (4.1 KB)
Fourth Try
- One Trigger with ...
- ...MouseButton "Actions executed on Press" triggers shortcut down
- ...MouseButton "Actions executed on Click RELEASE" triggers shortcut up
Fourth Try.bttpreset (4.3 KB)
Fifth Try - non BTT (BetterMouse)
- I tried also to make it work with BetterMouse, but BetterMouse does not seem to have the ability to hold a keyboard shortcut at all
- I also discontinued to use BetterMouse since Logitech Support is available in BTT
Sixth Try - non BTT (Karabiner Elements)
- With Karabiner Elements I was able to make it work as with the real keyboard
- But I don't want to use Karabiner Elements, since my mouse setup is done in BTT
All these attempts (except Sixth Try) did not show the same behavior like when I press the keyboard shortcut with the actual keyboard, in combination with the App I want to use with this shortcut (see next chapter for details).
WHY I want to achieve that
- I recently discovered the crossplattform pie menu called "Kando": https://kando.menu/
- It has a very fast way of interaction, called the "Turbo Mode"
- How to Use Kando | Kando
- Once "Turbo Mode" is activated you can interact with Kando through a mixture of gestures an clicks
- The "Turbo Mode" is activated by holding a keyboard shortcut
- When you release this keyboard shortcut, the hovered element is being triggered
- Kando does not provide a way to activate "Turbo Mode" by a mouse button, (since this is difficult to implement crossplatform) but promotes BTT or Karabiner for macOS to do so: Opening Menus with Mouse Buttons | Kando
- The beauty of Kando in combination with BTT is, that you can call BTTCLI from within Kando which enables you to trigger everything BTT is able to do from within Kando.
With the keyboard shortcut bound to a mouse-button I am able to open Kando, but I am not able to use the "Turbo Mode".
Of course, this also could be a problem on the side of "Kando"....but I with Karabiner Elements it worked properly and would imagine that BTT strives to be able to replicate the behavior of a real keyboard as good as possible.
All in all, I think there is something within BTT that hinders my UseCase.
What would help me
- I am willing to spend more time to make this UseCase work, so any hint/idea is highly appreciated
- Is there a way to debug/see which keys (incl. modifiers) is BTT currently sending?
- If this is something BTT cannot / will not support, please also let me know - at least I can stop trying
Correlated discussions in the community
I found various similar discussion in the BTT community - but none really helped to solve my challenge. At least, I think I am not the only one with this challenge:
- Press and Hold Keyboard Shortcuts
- Add Option to "Hold Keys Down"
- How to hold multi keyboard button
- How to assign one mouse button to a Modifier Key
Thank you very much and have a great day.
Kind regards,
Volker
