Ever since Apple launched the MacBook lineup, it appears that each one has been discussing the Touch Bar. The helpfulness, or lack thereof. Personally, I think it’s truly good, and it will become even better. One of the things Apple discussed in their keynote, was the fact that the Touch Bar could also be as easily customized in very much the same way as one would customize the tool bar on any Apple application on their Mac. So, if you have the brand new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and you need to customize the Touch Bar tools, here is how you can do it:
Customizing Touch Bar
It’s really very simple to customize the Touch Bar. I would rather have Spotlight where Siri is, because I don’t ever use Siri, and the customization alternatives just provides a lot more flexibility to utilize the Touch Bar in the way you’d need to. To customize the Touch Bar, you simply need to follow the below steps:
Note: I don’t have a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, so I’m using the trick to get the Touch Bar on any Mac, and I’ll show you how to customize it. The process is exactly the same for the real Touch Bar though, so you won’t find any differences there.
[ad type=”banner”]- Go to System Preferences on your Mac, and click on Keyboard.
- Here, click on the button that says “Customize Control Strip“.
- You will then be shown a display with all of the Touch Bar buttons that you can use. Simplydrag the ones you want to the bottom of your Mac’s screen, and they will drop down onto your Touch Bar.
- If you customize your Touch Bar, and later decide that you wanted the default one, that’s easy too. Simply drag and drop the “Default Set” onto your Touch Bar.
When you are done, basically click on the “Done” button, and your Touch Bar will have updated to show the new buttons that you put in there. It’s simple to customize the Touch Bar, and you can keep tweaking it, until you discover the exact set of buttons that work for you.
Bonus: Take Screenshots of the Touch Bar
While the Touch Bar is essentially a display, it’s not on your screen. So, your general screenshot alternate ways wouldn’t work. You can’t, for instance, press command + space + 3, and have the Touch Bar appear in the screen shot. If you need to take screenshots of your Touch Bar, you can utilize the new alternate routes that Apple implemented particularly for that purpose.
- To take a screenshot of the Touch Bar, and save it as an image file, simply press “command + shift + 6“.
- If you simply want to copy the screenshot to the clipboard, you can press “control + command + shift + 6“, instead, and then paste the screenshot wherever you want to.
Those are the ways you can take screenshots of the Touch Bar on your Mac. Unluckily, there is no way to take screenshots of specific regions on the Touch Bar, so if that’s what you needed to do, you’ll need to simply edit the screenshot.