Hello, I have a new MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar and I use the Mac’s “Show Desktop” command a lot. That’s difficult to do with the touch bar since now it requires 2 keys are depress instead of one F key. I’ve reset the command in system prefs to just be the fn key, but that conflicts with times I need to show the f keys in the touch bar. I’d liek to set it to fn+shift, or fn+control. Any suggestions how to do this with KM?
Not sure I understand your question completely – do you mean you’d like KM to respond to ONLY fn+shift or fn+control, with no other key being pressed with that combo? Or do you want fn+shift or fn+control plus a third key?
Yes, I want fn+shift, or fn+control to evoke “Show Desktop”, but from your reply I’m assuming KM needs more than just modifiers, and that would make sense.
Yeah, those two keys alone would be a bad idea for a macro. They are commonly used in combination with other keys for various apps so you’d be invoking it every time you used another shortcut. But you can still be creative – I use an external keyboard with keys I never use, and they come in handy sometimes. For example, I have a Microsoft Natural 4000 Keyboard with a Pause/Break key that gets mapped to the Mac as F15. I’ve used that as a shortcut key to bring up the calculator. So maybe there’s something similar you can do – make up a combination or use a key you’d otherwise never use, and map it to F11 or Fn+F11?
I really like the new Touch Bar, but losing F keys that I can single key press for triggers of my KM macros is going to be hard get accustomed to. I’ve been rethinking how to trigger my macros. As for Show Desktop, I set it to activate in a hot corner. So far so good.
Generally, the Fn key is not a real key, not a modifier like Option or Shift, but instead is a hardware toggle, that toggles the meaning of the function keys between their function key behaviour and their hardware key behaviour, and in the case of the Touch Bar, presumably also toggles the behaviour of the Touch Bar.
But you cannot do things like “Fn-A”.
You can trigger on a modifier key (like Shift) using the USB Device Key trigger, but that does not really help you here, since you cannot restrict it to the Fn key (I’m not even sure if the USB Device Key trigger can detect the Fn key).
I set the bottom left corner of my screen as a hotspot to Show Desktop. So far it’s working great for me. Very easy! That’s not to diminish my admiration for Keyboard Maestro, which is one of my most useful apps I own.