A Push From The Automators Podcast

I was listening to the Automators podcast and they suggested that it would be a good idea to run the Stream deck from bettertouchtool rather than using the software that comes from Elgato.

Click on the Image above to see the tutorial

I wasn’t too impressed with the Elgato software so I thought - why not

After getting the Apple MacBook Pro M1 in October I moved the settings for stream deck across from my old iMac. Some of the buttons didn’t work because I hadn’t brought across all of the keyboard shortcuts I had set up on the iMac.

Making a Fresh Start with Better Touch Tool

So Taking this into consideration… it’s a good idea to start fresh and new. In any case, I don’t think there is a way to copy across the settings from the Elgato software into Better Touch Tool.

I’ve started this process already. So far I’ve set up a button which will balance the windows using the shortcut set up in SKHD for Yabai. Check out my previous video for more details on that window tiling app. Most of the key strokes I’ll use in Yabai I’ll do directly on the Mac keyboard. It’ll be handy though to have one or two that I probably won’t remember straight away, on the Stream Deck.

Button to Toggle Voice Control

I’ve set up the button which turns on and off Voice Control with a toggle. I’ve also set a button to do the paste without formatting. I’m of the opinion that pasting without formatting should be the default action when you use command V. I wonder if I can go into settings and change that. I have a look and get back to you on that one.

So let’s open bettertouchtool and get started. As you can see in Raycast I have an alias for that, I only have to type in the three letters BTT. and off we go…

The first thing you have to do before getting started is to go into the settings. You’ll need to put a tick into the box for Stream Deck Support Enabled. There’s a button there - Show Stream Deck Documentation which will take you to a webpage with more information on how to set this up.

I’m selecting fully controlled by Bettertouchtool. I don’t need to run the official stream deck software and I’m going to have to configure everything in bettertouchtool. That works for me..

Now we can get started with the buttons in the Stream Deck. Here are the ones I’ve done already.

Button To Balance The Yabai Grid Of Apps

This first one is called balance and it runs the keyboard shortcut of shift option E which is in the SKHD program to balance the windows on the screen in Yabai.

The next button I set up is to run a shortcut called voice control which toggles on and off each time I press the button.

Then I have a button called paste without formatting I should be able to remember the keyboard shortcut for this , but I often forget so it’s worth having it as a button on the stream deck.

It’s possible to rearrange these buttons with dragging and dropping in this Area of the Stream deck configuration . So if I want to have voice control in second place I can just move it down one.

I have also set up a couple of Stream deck of buttons for specific applications. In Drafts, so far, I have set up one button which is to archive a selected draft or drafts. I will add more buttons as I go in this app which I use a lot.

Buttons to Control MailMate

In Mailmate I have added two buttons, one is to archive the message and the other is to delete the message. I have chosen the colour red which is appropriate for deletion of an message and added an SF symbol for easier identification of the button. I use the application San Fransymbols to look for the code needed to set this up. In the list of buttons on the left hand side, as you can see it just says stream deck button. I could leave it like that but it’s probably better to give it a more useful name. We can do this over on the right hand side there where it says - display name. Going back to the Voice Control button you can see there I used an image of a microphone. You’ve got four choices which are for using text, emojis, SF symbols or images. Obviously you can change colours of text, sf symbols and backgrounds.

Let’s set up a new button to use with Mailmate. I went into settings, keyboard and I set up a keyboard shortcut to synchronise with the mail server. It’s usually does this automatically but sometimes you want to force it. This will bring any new mail from the server onto your a computer. This is how you do it in keyboard shortcuts, go to the left side and choose app Shortcuts. You put in the name of the menu, followed by the path to the exact menu item. In this one it is file, synchronise, all sources. In between each of these words do you need to put in a dash followed by a greater than symbol so that it works. Make sure you do it exactly right including the capitalisation and spaces. In this one I chose to use the hyperkey plus a dash.

Using a Hyperkey

You can set up the hyper key in Better Touch Tool but I have already done it in another app called Hyperkey. Let’s add this one to Mail Mate in Better Touch Tool. First press the plus button in the left-hand window. You’ll see a pop down giving you the option to select a trigger and obviously the trigger we want to select is a stream deck button. Then we go to the middle window and assign the first action to selected trigger. Press the plus button and you’ll have the opportunity of Setting the keyboard shortcut in the panel to the right. Here I’m using the hyperkey plus a dash - As I set it up in the System settings. Next we want to configure the look of the button - so click on it in the List of buttons in the left panel. Change the display name to synchronise mail In SF symbols I’m going to search for the word Mail and I have a few choices. I think I will go for mail.stack.fill Towards the bottom on the right-hand panel choose from SF symbols and put in the symbol name. Then we can choose the colour for the symbol and the colour for the background. Or I could choose to have an emoji in there instead of the SF symbol. You will see the button change on the stream deck device as you make the changes assuming it’s for all applications. If it’s for a specific application then you’ll need to change to the application before you actually see the button appear. Let’s open up mailmate and now I can see the new button I just made. There’s a preview of the streamdeck to see what’s going on also.

What Happens With all The Buttons?

When I’m using Mailmate I can see the buttons which are available in all applications. At the moment when I don’t have too many buttons I’m wondering how that’s going to work when I have more than 15 buttons all together - with the buttons for the app and also the buttons which are designated for all applications.

It’s also is possible to have groups of buttons. This is where you have a button leading to another level of buttons underneath. Let’s set one of those up now. For the moment I’ll just have this open an application. Just to see how it goes with groups. I’m more likely to use Raycast as an application launcher rather than using Bettertouchtool. By default the Bettertouchtool layout of stream deck buttons will flow from top left to bottom right. It’s possible to set a fixed row and column for a button. In this case I’ve set voice control so that it will always be in a row one column one. So I can change to another application and it will always be in the same place.

There are more things I can do with this set up so what I’ll do is all make another video when I am further along in the process of setting up this stream deck with Bettertouchtool.