If you have a Macbook laptop, you’re probably familiar with the touch bar. It’s a neat little LED display above the top row of your keyboard that Mac OS/X uses to display context-sensitive widgets. However, you don’t just have to accept the widgets that Apple provides–you can in fact customize the touchbar however you like.
“But why would I want to do this?”, I hear you ask. Well, maybe you need to have a custom status of some kind displayed on your menu bar. For me, it was… wireless networks.
That sounds confusing, but hear me out. Sometimes when I am traveling, I get kicked off of whatever wireless network I’m on. I wanted a way to easily determine what network I was on, without having to keep clicking on the wireless icon in my menu bar. I found that the touch bar was a convenient way to do that, and in this post, I will show you how I did it.
First, download an app called MTMR. MTMR stands for “My Touchbar. My rules.” Installation instructions are on that page, but most users will want the dmg file.
Once that’s installed, you can edit the file $HOME/Library/Application Support/MTMR/items.json to change what appears in the menu bar. The contents of the file are JSON, and you can edit this in whichever editor you like. Furthermore, once you save changes, they take effect immediately–no restarts of the MTMR app are necessary!