Pop-up-on-hover Menu when hovering Trigger stopped showing

Bugs or Unexpected Behavior
1

Note:
I have long used Floating Palettes. I use a standard size with fifteen square Triggers in a 3-column 5-row grid (that mimics a Stream Deck turned sideways and also fits an iPhone screen). For many of these square Triggers I have a pop-up “sub” Floating Menu that gives me an assortment of additional Triggers. All of these sub-Floating-Menus stopped working recently, on more than one of my 15-Trigger Floating Menus. I would like to get this functionality back.

Describe the bug
Since this has worked for many months, I expect it to continue. On Triggers that have a sub-Floating-Menu, the sub-Floating-Menu is displayed after an if() Action queries whether a visible Floating Menu Identifier contains the part of the text in the Trigger Item Name/Identifier, e.g.: “if ( NOT (visible_floating_menu_identifiers CONTAINS "LrC") )”. That if() Action is the first Action of three or four under “Actions Executed On Hover Start”. The next three Actions show the sub-Floating-Menu, fork with an Else() Action, and end with an “End if Condition” Action. I have left out the “Else()” Action and these macros still work to show the pop-up-on-hover sub-Floating-Menu.

This behavior has continued through several closings of BetterTouchTool and rebooting of my computer.

Affected input device (e.g. MacBook Trackpad, Magic Mouse/Trackpad, Touch Bar, etc.):

This happens on my November 2024 MacBook Pro running MacOS 15.7.2. I use an Apple Magic Keyboard.

Screenshots
I can provide screenshots if helpful

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: November 2024 MacBook Pro
  • macOS version: MacOS 15.7.2.
  • BetterTouchTool version: (please post the exact version - not just "the latest one"): 5.800

Additional information (e.g. crash logs, related issues, etc.):

This does not cause a crash. I know of no related issues.

2

could you share an example menu (here or mail to andreas@folivora.ai )? I'm using similar setups but haven't encountered issues yet. Maybe some specific setting causes the behavior.

1 Like
3

could you share an example menu ( here […] Maybe some specific setting causes the behavior.

Note that this worked for months and now does not. I don’t think I changed anything.

I don’t know how to most-usefully share the menus. Here is a screen-shot of my top-level menu. I use this one mostly to switch between apps. It is triggered by a 3-finger swipe up. That trigger continues to work. “LaBar” is just visually distinct – like the square Triggers it activates an application, in this case “LaunchBar”. The Triggers “LrC”, “Saf”, “Sircl”, and “Audio” each have their own sub-menus that used to show on hovering over them. The pink letters and the black letter trigger ancillary menus or hide this one.

Kirby Krieger BetterTouchTool 2025-12-24 at 14.27.24@2x
Kirby Krieger BetterTouchTool 2025-12-24 at 14.27.24@2x771×1263 40.8 KB

Here is the pop-up menu that used to show when I hovered over the Trigger with the Label “LrC”:

… wait, it’s not showing even when I click the “eye” control with the tooltip “Toggle Visibility”.

None of the four pop-up-on-hover menus show when I click the respective “Toggle Visibility” “eye” control.

Below I pasted the Clipboard content after copying one of these pop-up menus. I deleted the pages-long character string in “RenderedPreview”.

Let me know what else I can provide, or how best to provide what you asked for.

Note that the if() Action I am using never returns a negative result afaict. The result is “True” whether or not the specified text in the “floating_menu_identifiers” is visible or not. (Note too that the argument is negative: in effect, True if NOT visible.)

[
{
"BTTLastUpdatedAt" : 1760753533.4990859,
"BTTTriggerType" : 767,
"BTTTriggerTypeDescriptionReadOnly" : "Floating Menu",
"BTTTriggerParentUUID" : "B6B09435-8B44-4A71-B18F-A51BCF75B87A",
"BTTTriggerClass" : "BTTTriggerTypeFloatingMenu",
"BTTUUID" : "5E681AC7-072F-4F04-91CE-5799BEC646D6",
"BTTAdditionalConfiguration" : "Floating Menu: Audio",
"BTTOrder" : 5,
"BTTTriggerName" : "Floating Menu: TrigPal•Mini•LrCcatalogs",
"BTTMenuItems" : [
{
[I removed all the following text that I had pasted after copying the Menu to the system clipboard.]

4

Help please :sloth: I’m left hanging.

I lost ALL my “show on hover” Floating Menus. They are an integral part of my hourly workflow!

What I have done so far:

  • System level:
    • Closed and re-opened BetterTouchTool.
    • Upgraded BetterTouchTool to most recent full-release version.
    • Closed and re-opened my Mac.
    • Upgraded my MacOS from Sequoia to Tahoe.
    • Confirmed there is only one Desktop in use (to rule out the Floating Menus being shown but not visible; I use multiple monitors).
  • In BetterTouchTool:
    • Confirmed all Triggers and Actions used are enabled.
    • Confirmed the Actions “Show Floating Menu” in the Action set “Actions Executed On Hover Start” reference correctly an existing Floating Menu by re-selected the Menu from the “Or Choose From Existing Menus” dropdown.
    • Added “Else” Actions to the Action Stacks. The Stacks had comprised three Actions: if(), Show Floating Menu, END if Condition. This still processes as expected whether an Else Action is there or not.
    • Confirmed the irregular behavior happens regardless of the currently active application.
    • Created NEW pop-up-on-hover Floating Menus for the existing Floating Menu Triggers that stopped showing their pop-up Menus.
      • These SHOW.
    • Created NEW Floating Menu with NEW Trigger, created NEW Floating Menu to pop-up on hover, set new Trigger to show new Menu on hover.
      • Works!
      • The issue seems to be either my existing top-level Floating Menu, my existing show-on-hover Menus, or some interaction between them.
        • Again: Triggers there that used to pop-up “mini” Floating Menus on hover stopped showing those pop-up-on-hover Menus. Assigned new Menus to be popped up also does not work (they do not show).

Additional notes:

  • The control in the settings column to show the Floating Menu (an “eye” icon) regularly doesn’t work. Iirc, it used to always show the selected Floating Menu. Now, more often than not, it doesn’t do anything that I can see (in other words, now has the same effect as my “show-on-hover” Action Stack).
  • I’ve noticed nothing else not working as expected in BetterTouchTool.
  • I am launching the test Menu with a keychord. I launch my regular (now not working fully) Floating Menu with a trackpad gesture. I don’t think this has any bearing.

Additional questions, some more general:

  • How can I restore my pop-up-on-hover “mini” Menus to working order?
  • If I can’t, how best to recreate my top-level Menu so that I can bind pop-up-on-hover mini-Menus to its Triggers? (That top-level Menu is complex; 19 Items in the Group, all with customized formatting and Action Stacks.)
  • I had set up each pop-up-on-hover Action Stack with an if() Action that queried for the existence of the Trigger over which to pop-up. I think I did this by copying Andreas’ example (apologies if that is not the source). Is this recommended?
  • How best, in general, to store BetterTouchTool assets in BetterTouchTool?
    • I had grouped all my mini-Menus together in a top-level Group, but that seems awkward since some of them are application-specific.
    • Another way to look at this is: what is a Group in BetterTouchTool’s Floating Menus section/tab? It is both a Menu containing Triggers, and a folder containing Menus. This confuses me; IDK how to distinguish between Groups that are folders, and Groups that are Menus, and without that distinction I find the storage of assets impossible to rationalize.
5

Update. More weirdness.

The pop-up-on-hover Menus that I created to test the behavior have stopped working.

  • The NEW Menu that popped up on hovering over an old Trigger in my top-level Menu no longer shows on hover.

  • The new Menu that popped up on hovering over a new Menu made just to test this no longer shows on hover. The background color of the Trigger changes to something other than the pop-up Menu’s Trigger, but the text of the Trigger does not change.

I have restarted BetterTouchTool.

So these worked as expected when set-up, but then stop working within a few minutes. Why? How can I trouble-shoot this?