Support sending "Key Repeat" events for keyboard shortcut action

Some apps (in particular Final Cut Pro) use the "Key Repeat" event to recognize that a key is being held. Specifically, they require a "Key Down" followed by one or more "Key Repeat" events (interestingly, it makes no difference how many "Key Repeat" events are sent exactly, but it needs to be at least one). Could you please, add a "Send Key Repeat Only" option to the keyboard shortcut action? This would make BTT much more useful to control FCP.

So what you want to do doesn't work with BTT's key repeat? Actually it does exactly that, it repeats a key/shortcut when the key remains down.

No. BTT's key repeat has fundamentally different functionality (and not the one that apps like FCP accepts): it sends repeated sequences of "key down"->"key up" events (basically what I would achieve if I hit a key on my keyboard really fast). This is different from the way MacOS recognizes a key that is held which is a sequence of "key down"->"key repeat" events (yes, MacOS has an event that indicates that a key is still pressed). Does that make sense?

it's a bit hard to do this for the default repeat (because actions in BTT do not know about the triggers by default), but maybe I can ad some workaround to achieve this.

Having an option for the shortcuts to send one key repeat event right after the shortcut would be an easy option though.

Wouldn't that be the same as just repeating the shortcut in the macro?

Maybe a stupid idea: if the trigger cmd+1 does "something", and you put the action cmd+1 before this "something" (with prevent recursive triggers) isn't that what you want?

I don't think it needs integration with the trigger at all. At least for FCP, it only requires a single "key repeat" event after the "key down". I think this is because the repeat rate is configurable and apple wants it to work even if the repeat rate is very low. I suspect that other apps that use such key chords work the same way.

So, to solve my problem, having a fourth option "Send Key Repeat Only" in the drop-down (in addition to "Send Key Down and Key Up", "Send Key Down Only" and "Send Key Up Only") would fix my problem. This also provides the flexibility to send multiple "Key Repeat" events (I don't need it but someone might).

sounds good, I’ll try to add this option!

@Frank1 the key repeat event on macOS is something you wouldn’t notice usually (thus the BTT key repeat usually works well) but @little-big-s correct that some apps rely on it.

You are certainly right, I have little idea. I was just thinking, if a shortcut is to be repeated at least once after execution, then you could achieve that goal by repeating it as an action. Probably not :innocent:

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