Notch bar functionality deprecated, how to use floating menus for similar effects?

Floating Menus / Widgets
,
1

Recently upgraded my MBA, annoying notch. I would normally hide the menu bar to maximize screen real-estate. Now I'm stuck with a menu bar 50% larger and I can't use that area for windowing ... argggh Apple!

So I got quite excited to see the notch section in BTT. Might as well put something useful up there. But in the documentation the first line is a deprecation notice from June one year ago telling us to start with the floating window widgets instead.

I have tried creating menu bar widgets for similar functionality, but it is tough going, no presets to place anything on the menu bar or notch-adjacent. There are no widgets like in the notch section (reminders, weather, clipboard, shell script, all that stuff). It's AppleScript or Javascript and build from scratch. That's tough going.

I've tried searching through the docs and the forums here but I feel like I'm missing some information on where to start with getting the BTT deprecated notch functionality in the floating menu which seems fairly primitive (and menu centric rather than any kind of widgets really). Many someone can point me in the right direction?

I have gone back to the (deprecated) notch section in BTT and played around, it's nice! but it refuses to mimic the menubar icons or the clock on my notch screen (normal screens it does it perfectly), but what's the use chasing a bug on a deprecated function, right?

2

Wait 1-2 weeks for the next version, I'm currently adding lots of things that make it much easier to replace the Notch Bar feature with the floating menus. I'll add an update here once this is released!

3 Likes
3

great - looking forward to seeing what you've got in store

thanks for all your good work :slight_smile:

4

Meanwhile I've got it to display results of a shell script thanks to this post Accessing scripting variables

(async () => {

   // put the shell script into a string (single backticks are great for multiline strings)
   let shellScript = `~/bin/notch/active-tasks 0`;


   let shellScriptWrapper = {
      script: shellScript, // mandatory
      // launchPath: '/opt/homebrew/bin/bash', //optional - default is /bin/bash
      // parameters: '-c', // optional - default is -c. If you use multiple parameters please separate them by ;; e.g. -c;;date
      // environmentVariables: '' //optional e.g. VAR1=/test/;VAR2=/test2/;
   };

   // this will execute the Apple Script and store the result in the result variable.
   let result = await runShellScript(shellScriptWrapper);

   // trim the result removing leading detritus
   // i.e.
   result = result.trim();

   // at the end you always need to call returnToBTT to exit the script / return the value to BTT.
   returnToBTT(result);

   // it is important that this function self-executes ()
})();