I may have discovered a way to get the Touch Bar to work when using Mission Control

Discussion & Questions
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If you’ve used BetterTouchTool long enough you’ve probably realised that BetterTouchTool’s Touch Bar does not work when using Mission Control (Exposé/Spaces, ⌘+tab). This has been noted several times as being a restriction set by Apple that third-party Touch Bar’s will not work.

However, this is not entirely true.

Let me introduce to you Global Gestures.

Global Gestures work even if the Touch Bar is hidden. I use Gestures on my Touch Bar every day, for example: two-finger swipe to change volume and three-finger swipe to change brightness.

If I’m in Mission Control, I am still able to do the above Gestures, even if the Touch Bar is hidden. This proves that “touches” aren’t totally ignored when using Mission Control.

You can change a Gesture to any trigger you wish, including “ESC” (alternatively typing “⎋” by press the actual ESC key)

My proposition: allow us to make some sort of Global Gesture-Trigger-Area feature on the Touch Bar. We could then map out the area for where the ESC sits (ultimately, every Trigger, but let’s keep it simple and talk about the ESC function) and when that area of the Touch Bar is hit, the Trigger — ESC key — is triggered and effectively hides Mission Control.

1 Like
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Really no comments yet? This is very interesting and would love to start a discussion...

3

I also have those gestures mapped (2 fingers for volume, 3 for brightness), and when I'm in mission control, they DO NOT work.

Except. If I put 2 or 3 fingers over the touchbar (even if I don't start to trigger the gesture) and then invoke mission control, then, I can slide those fingers left and right to change the volume or brightness. But as soon as a single finger leaves the touchbar, it will become unresponsive again until mission control is disabled.

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BetterTouchTool can recognize gestures in Mission Control if they are marked as global. The problem: there is no way to detect if mission control is active, so this doesn’t help too much ;-(

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@Andreas_Hegenberg: I understand this.

What I’m proposing is if you can make a way for some sections of the Touch Bar (e.g. first 50px) to be an ‘always gesture’ zone. That way the esc will always work and it’s not needed to know or even care if Mission Control is active.