As an avid and long time user of BetterTouchTool, it’s great to see the recently released 3.0 version that includes not only a modern redesign, but several new features for managing finger gesture actions, searching actions, and a couple ways of viewing the user interface.
BetterTouchTool Finger Gesture Course
My BTT course covers all you need to know for getting the most out of the application.
Redesigned User Interface
BetterTouchTool 3.0 has been redesigned, but it’s not so radically changed that if you’re current user of the application you will feel lost.
As a matter of fact, if you don’t like the redesign, you can navigate to the BTT icon in your Mac’s menu bar and open the Old Configuration which even contains newer actions that you create version 3.0.
Note: if you’re never tried BetterTouchTool, you can download a trail version here (affiliate link.)
The new user interface allows for viewing actions in list or column view and configurations, including the pre-defined actions exist in the right side panel.
Folders: you can create folders to group related actions or to run multiple actions with a single finger gesture. Note: it’s easier to use the column view to drag triggers into a folder.
2. Emojis: One or more emojis can be added to a note, and you can also save the note as the Trigger Name for an action.
3. Split Right Panel: the right side panel can be split away from the main three panel.
4. Apps Column: you can be collapse the apps column to only show the app icons.
5. Repeated Action: you can set actions to automatically repeat.
Click/tap here to view the column view layout of BTT
Disable BetterTouchTool Trigger
One of the features I welcome the most BetterTouchTool 3.0 is the ability to temporarily disable selected actions or finger gestures. There’s been occasions when I was troubleshooting a BTT trigger, and I would have to delete an action to figure out the problem.
You simply right-click on an action or finger gesture and select the Enable/Disable Selected Trigger.
Notice also that you can copy a link to activate a trigger. For example, I use a BTT action for toggling the macOSs Night Shift feature. I don’t use it daily, so basically I mapped the link to an Alfred workflow which enables me to type my assigned keyword trigger, “night,” which toggles the BTT action. Note: See my article about mapping.
BetterTouchTool Settings
For the most part, BTT settings shouldn’t be messed with unless you know what you’re doing. With that said, there are several settings for adjusting finger gesture controls, moving and resizing windows, adjusting force touch gestures, enabling and disabling Touch Bar integration, and much more.
Below, are three new settings features that stand out and may be of use to general and advance users.
- Side-Bar
- Synce BTT
- Scripting
Under User Interface, you can change the color of the right-sidebar.
Under the Sync section, you can choose to sync your BTT actions via iCloud or Dropbox. Note: this is a very experimental feature. I’ll give it a try and report on my findings.
Starting with version 2.430, BTT support three methods of basic scripting via AppleScript, custom BTT URL scheme and an integrated web server.
Comment Below
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Thank you for the quick tour! It was just enough to inform me that I don’t need to dig any deeper for now.
🙂 I hear you. And yes, you really can just keep doing what you’ve been doing. I don’t think there’s any drastically different that will change your workflow and use of the program. At this point, I don’t even even see a need to re-do my BTT course. I’ll just add a few update videos. Thanks for sharing.
Since the update all my shortcuts are disabled and I absolutely don’t understand why !
Hmmm, not sure why that happened. I know it’s an hassle, but be sure to let the developer know what happened just in case it’s a bug. And thanks for letting us know.