Thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I am a huge fan of BetterTouchTool and use it all day every day on my Mac. I wouldn’t know what to do without it. From customizing my keyboard shortcuts to adding infinite gestures to my trackpad to running my entire Stream Deck setup, there’s nothing this little utility can’t do.
I think BetterTouchTool is well known to readers of this blog (thanks Brett!), so I won’t go into the details of the many things you can do with it. Instead I want to promote a powerful new feature that has been added to BTT recently and is currently in beta phase: Floating Menus.
Imagine them as highly flexible, widget-like menus that you can place virtually anywhere on your screen. You can attach them to specific positions in specific windows, to specific screens, the current mouse position and many more. You can specify whether they float on top, stick them to your desktop or have them behave like normal windows (and more).
They can always be visible, expand on mouse hover or be shown/hidden via any trigger in BTT.
A Floating Menu contains either standard buttons, or widgets like sliders or even web view items. Their appearance is completely customizable. All items are fully scriptable via AppleScript or Javascript, and soon there will be a plugin system to load custom widgets.
The Floating Menus will soon become the basis for numerous existing BetterTouchTool features, such as Stream Deck and Notch Bar support and several predefined actions. These will gradually transition to utilize the Floating Menu rendering and scripting engine making them more flexible and robust by streamlining maintenance & future development.
Additionally, the upcoming (entirely new) version of the iOS BTT Remote app will be capable of rendering your custom Floating Menus on your iPhone or iPad.
You can find various Floating Menu examples on share.folivora.ai. For example have a look at the Notch menu, which is invisible by default but expands from your Macbook’s Notch on hover. Another nice example is the “Mini Emoji Menu” preset: it places a little transparent dot on the left edge of the active window, which, when hovered, shows multiple custom emoji which you can insert by clicking.
The documentation for this new feature is already available, and you can always come to the community site to discuss or request features. Now that I have a solid working base, I can easily built on it, so please report any bugs and request any feature you can think of!
Try BetterTouchTool now (45 day free trial) or go and purchase a license with this 20% coupon code: BTBTT2023.
