Tinkering with the touchbar.

When I started a new job a few months ago. I was given a MacBook Pro 15″, with the infamous touchbar.

I’ve eventually stopped lamenting about the loss of a physical escape key, and have employed some tips & tricks to make it a bit more useful.

No touchbar? touché my friend

If you don’t have a touchbar, but do have a Mac, you can use touché to emulate one on your screen and still use these tricks (bar touchid)

sudo at your fingertips

$ sudo sublime /etc/pam.d/sudo

Add the following line

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

And you should be left with something like this

 # sudo: auth account password session
 auth       sufficient     pam_tid.so
 auth       sufficient     pam_smartcard.so
 auth       required       pam_opendirectory.so
 account    required       pam_permit.so
 password   required       pam_deny.so
 session    required       pam_permit.so

Exit and then open your terminal again, and attempt to sudo and voila. sudo at your fingertip.

$ sudo touch

iStats

I’ve always liked knowing the temps of my CPU/GPU/RAM, and fan speeds stemming from overclocking/water-cooling my PC’s but mainly I wanted to quieten my fans without melting the work laptop.

It is ridiculously loud when it spins up a set of Docker containers or a VM and it just doesn’t need to be, so I use MacsFanControl to control the fan speeds, and iStats to keep an eye on some stats.

$ sudo gem install iStats

$ istats all

Total fans in system:   2
 CPU temp:               43.13°C     ▁▂▃▅▆▇
 Battery health:         Good
 Fan 0 speed:            3461 RPM    ▁▂▃▅▆▇
 Fan 1 speed:            3502 RPM    ▁▂▃▅▆▇
 Cycle count:            66          ▁▂▃▅▆▇  6.6%
 Max cycles:             1000
 Current charge:         1927 mAh    ▁▂▃▅▆▇  28%
 Maximum charge:         7025 mAh    ▁▂▃▅▆▇  95.8%
 Design capacity:        7336 mAh
 Battery temp:           30.8°C

Sweet, now let’s see if we can get them on the touchbar.

Apple let us modify the touchbar to a degree, but not enough to be able to add custom icons and scripts.

We can use BetterTouchTool but it’s not free, and I am loving open-source software, so I managed to find My Touchbar, My Rules. You can download it with HomeBrew.

$ brew cask install mtmr

Once installed you can find it in your Applications folder, run it and your touchbar will run the default config.

You can also do a 3 finger swipe to adjust brightness or a 2 finger swipe to adjust volume.

Let’s have a look at the config

$ sublime ~/Library/Application\ Support/MTMR/items.json

It is a json config file, defining each button. You can customise with a list of predefined button types listed on their homepage, but you can also write AppleScript or your own scripts and associated them with buttons.

My config is available here as a GitHub Gist and can be seen below

It was inspired by the following plugin for BetterTouchTool

iTerm2 Touchbar integration

If you don’t have iTerm, download it with HomeBrew.

$ brew cask install iterm2

You can view the iTerm2 docs for the touchbar here.

zsh-iterm-touchbar

With ZSH and a nifty plugin called zsh-iterm-touchbar, we can get our git info and run our npm run scripts in project folders.

If you aren’t already using zsh, then install it with HomeBrew

brew install zsh

Install OhMyZSH

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Clone the repo in your ZSH directory

$ cd ${ZSH_CUSTOM1:-$ZSH/custom}/plugins 
$ git clone https://github.com/iam4x/zsh-iterm-touchbar.git

Then add the plugin into your .zshrc

$ sudo sublime ~/.zshrc

TOUCHBAR_GIT_ENABLED=true 
plugins=(... zsh-iterm-touchbar)

Restart your terminal and you should see

In a git enabled folder

Showing run scripts from a package.json

List of options

• F1 – Current directory 👉
• F2 – Current git branch, press to display all branches and switch between them 🎋
• F3 – Current git repo status 🔥 / 🙌
• • + — uncommitted changes in the index;
• • ! — unstaged changes;
• • ? — untracked changes;
• • $ — stashed changes;
• • ⇣ — unpulled commits;
• • ⇡ — unpushed commits.
• F4 – Push to origin branch (git push origin [branch]) ✉️
• F5 – Display npm-run or yarn-run scripts from package.json

More touch-bar resources

An open-source list tracking touchbar projects

https://github.com/zakrid/awesome-touchbar

Whilst we’re at it

I am using a few zsh plugins which make my life so much easier.

plugins=(
   git
   dotenv
   osx
   yarn
   npm
   node
   nvm
   docker
   iterm2
   brew
   battery
   alias-tips
   zsh-iterm-touchbar
   zsh-autosuggestions
   zsh-syntax-highlighting
 )

A full list of the out-of-the-box supported plugins

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/tree/master/plugins

You can find more to install

https://github.com/unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins#plugins