The most developed one seems to be Touch Bar Simulator. It’s not a terribly difficult trick, but there aren’t a lot of choices out there. I did, however, miss that howzit integration I mentioned, at least enough that I got curious about Touch Bar simulators I could easily run on my Mac mini. So I didn’t really miss the Touch Bar when I moved over to an M1 Mac mini. I’d stretch to it on the occasions I needed to use Touch ID or run a howzit command, but not for any of the other features it offered.

Howzit tasks in the Touch Barĩ0% of the time my MacBook was on a stand next to an external display, being controlled from an external keyboard and trackpad, and the Touch Bar was, at best, inconvenient to reach.

I had a cool script that made buttons for tasks that howzit could run in the current directory when I was in the terminal, and I used that quite a bit, but other than that, not really. I immediately loved the idea of the Touch Bar, made it do a few cool things, and generally appreciated the fact that it was there, offering contextually-relevant and visually identifiable “keys.” Did I actually use it? Not a lot. So I had a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar for a couple of years. But how could I call myself a “Mac Mad Scientist” if things didn’t get a little crazy? We’re all mad here, right? I almost didn’t write this post because I was worried it would indicate mental instability of some kind 2. I know, the first thing you thought when you read that was “but Apple is discontinuing the Touch Bar!” Let me explain. I’ve recently put some 1 time into making a Touch Bar “dashboard” using BetterTouchTool.

Better touch tool crack