Better Touch Tool Catalina

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As I’ve written before, I use this weird keyboard which has helped greatly with my carpal tunnel issues.

While this odd keyboard is great for normal typing, certain key combinations are unwieldy. So for the past decade I’ve used an external gaming keypad to the left of my keyboard with custom macros set up for some common commands:

The best BetterTouchTool alternatives are AutoHotkey, AquaSnap and Karabiner Elements. Our crowd-sourced lists contains more than 50 apps similar to BetterTouchTool for Mac, Windows, Linux, PortableApps.com and more. Update: the YouTube subscriber count tutorial in this video is old, and has been updated in this video here - people, hope yo. How to disable Better Touch Tool (BTT) inside a specific app? MacBook Pro 2020 running Catalina 10.15.6 does not sleep at night. Hot Network Questions. A quick fresh installation of Catalina on another drive and the experimenting could begin! Downloading CAT, not reading anything, just installing and so my first kernel panic was born. I then read that the tool is only supported till OS 10.12 and did some further research on the issue online. Fixes for the Touch Bar behavior of the new M1 Macbook Pro. Improved Hyper Key responsiveness and in general better integration of the Hyper Key into other BTT functionality. Hyper Key can now execute a 'Named Trigger' in case it was not use as part of a shortcut (this allows to e.g. Trigger ESC or keep the Toggle Caps Lock functionality).

  • Select All
  • Undo
  • Copy
  • Cut
  • Paste
  • Paste and Match Style
  • Pasteboard History (which is part of Better Touch Tool)

When my beloved Logitech keypad crapped out, I switched to the well-reviewed Razer Tartarus Pro. It’s nicely built! Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer drivers for the current macOS.

After a lot of googling, I’ve cobbled together a solution. So in the interest of sharing what I’ve learned — and remembering how I got this to work in the first place — let me walk through the steps.

Note that this doesn’t do half of what a proper driver could accomplish, particularly for gaming. So please, Razer, make one! But if you want to use a gaming pad like the Tartarus Pro for keyboard shortcuts, this does the trick.

How to make the Tartarus Pro work on macOS Catalina

It’s important to understand that macOS sees the Tartarus Pro as a plain old keyboard. So if you plug it in and hit the 08 key, you’ll see it type a ‘w’.

Luckily, there’s software that can recognize that and do something useful instead.

Better Touch Tool is best known for getting random mice and trackpads to work, but it does a nice job on keyboards as well. (I’m using the 3.5 Alpha version.)

Let’s look at the Select All shortcut. You’ll notice the “Assigned Action” is ⌘A. Now direct your attention to the righthand sidebar. That’s where all the real work happens.

1) For the moment, ignore the “Click here to record a shortcut” section. We’ll come back to that.

Better Touch Tool Catalina

2) You want the shortcut Enabled, so check the box. 1password personal.

3) You should put a note in this field for clarity.

4) The HUD overlay is surprisingly helpful. It shows what’s happening, like that you just hit “copy.” I find the Title text to be too large, so I use the Subtitle instead.

5) For Trigger Conditions, you want to choose “Works on keyboards with the same type as used for recording.” Yes, this is a ridiculously long label.

6) You want it to Trigger on Key Down.

7) You don’t want it to repeat.

You’ll do these steps for each key on the gaming keypad you want to remap. Here’s my setup.

I also set key 20, the spacebar, to Undo.

In theory, you’re done! For a few weeks, this worked great. And then it started having issues. When encountering password fields, my normal keyboard would start triggering keyboard shortcuts. I had to restart Better Touch Tool multiple times per day.

Basically, the app kept getting my normal weird keyboard confused with my special weird gaming keypad. I needed to call in the big guns.

Enter Karabiner

I’d long heard of Karabiner Elements, a public domain app that can remap any key and do really impressive things. But it’s intimidating as hell.

Here’s what I wanted Karabiner to do: remap the keys of the Tartarus Pro to seldom-used keystrokes so I could then set those as triggers for Better Touch Tool.

Looking through their user forums, I couldn’t find any perfect matches for this use case, but luckily @bradcurtis had built a set of custom mappings (a “complex modification” in Karabiner speak) for a similar purpose.

Installing them is odd. Here’s how you do it.

  1. Install Karabiner-Elements. You’ll have to give it a ton of permissions in System Preferences.

  2. In Karabiner-Elements Preferences, choose Complex Modications and then Add Rule.

  3. On the next screen, choose “Import More Rules from the internet.”

  4. Either search for “Tartarus” or follow this link Vmware fusion 3 download.

  5. Choose the Import button. It’ll ask you whether you want to open the link in Karabiner-Elements. You do.

  6. Click the button to “Enable All”

If you have the Tartarus v2 like @bradcurtis, you’re done! All of the keys should be mapped to new, less-common keystrokes. But if you have the Tartarus Pro like I do, you need to modify the settings you just imported to change the product ID. This is where it gets frustratingly user-hostile, because it requires you to modify a JSON file in an external editor.

  1. Navigate to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json — the easiest way to do this is by choosing Go > Go to Folder… in the Finder.

  2. Open this file in a plain text editor (I use TextMate).

  3. Find and replace 555 (the product ID for the v2) with 580 (the product ID for the Pro).1

  4. Save this file and restart Karabiner-Elements.

After doing this, and mapping these new keystrokes to Better Touch Tool, I’m back up to full speed.2

Better

Again, almost no one on Earth will never need or want to do any of this. But if you’re the one person who needs this solution, I hope it helps. Please pay it forward by documenting something you’ve discovered.

  1. If you’re looking for a different product ID, open the Event Viewer in Karabiner-Elements and choose Devices. ↩
  2. I added one additonal modification, converting key 20 (which is coded as “spacebar”) to Left_Shift-Left_Option-s. ↩

Making screenshots of parts of your Mac display can be a valuable tool when you’re trying to remember settings or a sequence of actions or explain them to someone else. I know that I’m an oddball as a technology writer, as I’m constantly capturing pieces of a screen in order to write these columns. But my correspondence with readers over many years reveals that a lot of you also use built-in (and in some eras, third-party) screenshot tools.

Also over many years, Macworld has covered the basics and advanced features, but Apple has kept monkeying with how screen captures work, so here’s a fairly full refresh including a few secrets I only learned days ago from Twitter.

Better Touch Tool Catalina Not Working

In macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple got rid of the long-running Grab app, a screen-captured utility with several features beyond what you could manage with keystrokes. Instead, it embedded most of those features into a new shortcut. From the keyboard you can now press:

  • Command-Shift-3: Capture all active screens as separate files.

  • Command-Shift-4: Capture a selection you drag to define.

  • Command-Shift-5: Capture a selection, window, menu, or screen, record a video, or modify screen-capture settings.

  • Command-Shift-6: Capture the Touch Bar on Macs so equipped.

Add the Control key while pressing Command-Shift-3 or -4, and the screenshot is copied to the Clipboard instead of being saved to your drive. You can paste that into any image editor, like Preview or Pixelmator. (Use Command-Shift-5 and click Options to change the storage locations of all subsequent screen captures, instead; destinations include the Clipboard.)

Read up on how to use the macOS markup tools on captures and how to stop the floating preview from appearing.

Command-Shift-4 (also available via Command-Shift-5 as click Capture Selected Portion) is one of the most flexible tools, though its options are mostly hidden away.

You can capture a menu by clicking it, pressing Command-Shift-4, and then moving the crosshairs icon over it. Capture a window by first pressing the keystroke and then moving the crosshairs over it. In both cases, finally press the spacebar to highlight the item you want. Click the item or press Return or Enter to capture.

You can also press Command-Shift-4, drag a rectangle, and then press one of the following modifiers to change the selection while still holding down the mouse or touchpad button:

  • Add the spacebar and you can move the current selection around the screen or screens without changing its dimension.

  • Add Shift, and you can drag the selection wider or narrower constrained to the horizontal or vertical depending on how you start dragging after holding the Shift key down.

  • Add Option and the selection expands or contracts simultaneously in all four directions.

  • Add both Shift and Option, and the constraint is both directions horizontally or vertically.

Better Touch Tool Catalina Free

When you reshape a selection with Shift included, releasing the key snaps the selection in the perpendicular direction to wherever the cursor is—that is, it moves it horizontally to meet the cursor if you constrained vertically and vice versa.

To avoid that, don’t release the Shift key. Instead either release the mouse or trackpad button or click the mouse’s right button or the equivalent. This immediately captures the selection without further resizing.

Thanks to designer/developer Jonnie Hallman for sharing his discovery on Twitter.

Better Touch Tool Catalina Island

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Better Touch Tool Catalina

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