Turning off the Touch Bar on macOS
I purchased a Macbook with a Touch Bar a few months ago. While I loved the features that came with some apps, I found myself distracted when accidentally hitting keys. So naturally, I opened the System Preferences and looked for ways to disable the Touch Bar. I couldn’t find any. “Fine then, I’ll look for apps online!”. And I couldn’t find any either.
After digging in the Keyboard preferences, I came up with a rather minimal Touch Bar.
While this solution definitely improved the accidental typing (although not completely — is something wrong with my little fingers?), I was now deprived of the nice features. Which ones you ask? Quickly muting my microphone on Webex/Teams, fast forwarding videos, etc... .
And I asked myself: “What if? What if I could create an app that would do just that, hide the Touch Bar? How would I call such an app though?”.
And Hide My Bar was born. Very original, right?
How does it work?
Just double tap on a key and the bar is gone. Focus on your task, no distraction. Double tap again and it’s right back up. It’s that easy.
And that’s not all! You also have the ability to switch between your regular Touch Bar and the Function Keys (F1, F2, …) if you want. Take a look in this short video.
The app sits in the menu bar and allows you to configure a few things. Among the most interesting, you can:
- Configure the key you double tap on to hide/show the Touch Bar (I’m sure you guessed this one! You can choose the key among ⌘ Command, ⌥ Option, ⇧ Shift and ⌃ Control)
- Configure the key you want to use to display the Function Keys (F1, F2, …)
- Display main controls in the menu (sometimes we only have one hand available or are too lazy to move it so I figured it would be convenient to add these controls in the menu)
- Always display the esc key
It’s surprisingly very smooth with any workflow. And by the way, it’s compatible with any other apps you may use to tweak the Touch Bar, like adding fancy new icons, the weather or even the price of your favorite stocks.
The app works out of the box, no specific settings required and is Notarized by Apple!
Try it out!
That’s it, Hide My Bar is a simple app for a simple task. I hope you like it and feel free to send feedback to contact@clemstation.com.
