Pimp my Mac – Part 2 – Using MultiClutch

Ok, now that we got the basics out of the way in my last post. Lets move onto some more interesting utilities. We will start with Multiclutch.

It is a utility that lives in your System Preferences, created by Will Henderson, this tool can be downloaded from one of his blog posts.

Essentially what Multiclutch allows you to do is to map Gestures to keyboard shortcuts in specific applications. It also has a global layer which maps gestures to keyboard shortcuts when your not using any applications, i.e. it says finder in the upper left corner. Ill explain in more detail below.

If anyone has played around with the new macs they really don't use gestures a lot, and that's a shame since its such a useful feature. When I got my Macbook Pro last year, the only application that used it was iPhoto, and the finder. At that time safari did not support any gestures.

So go download the multiclutch.pref file from Will Henderson's blog post, install it, and follow the below steps to setup firefox with gestures.

Firefox

Note: I don't use safari for 2 reasons, mainly whenever I map gestures to safari, they get sucked up by the global layer before being passed to safari, this only occurs in the new 4.0. Also I just don't like safari for daily use, one example, if you put in a search term into the path bar, it literally tries to goto that web address by appending http://, etc.. to the search term. Most web browsers these days are smart enough to figure out when you want to search something and when you want to browse to an address. Although Safari does bring a lot of good features, for example its fully Acid 2 compliant, which means most pages, javascript, etc.. will run very smoothly.

Ok back to firefox.

I use the Chromifox Theme, makes it look like google chrome. I like google chrome a lot, but the mac build isn't very mature, so im sticking with firefox.

Now to the gestures. To add an application click the plus button on the left hand side panel, and browse to its .app file. To add a gesture, click the plus button on the right hand side panel, and select which gesture you want. To map a keyboard shortcut to it, double click the textfield in the 'Key Command' column and press the buttons that would constitute the keyboard shortcut you want to be mapped.

 Here is a screenshot of my multiclutch pref pane. Ill explain what each of the shortcuts does.

Rotate Left – Minimizes the Window
Rotate Right – Refresh Current Page
3-Finger Swipe Down – Move to the tab to the RIGHT of the current one.
3-Finger Swipe Up – Move to the tab to the LEFT of the current one.
3-Finger Swipe Left – Go Back
3-Finger Swipe Right – Go Forward
Zoom In – New Tab
Zoom Out – Close Tab

Global Settings

Here are my global settings for multiclutch. These get executed whenever you are not using any applications, or when using certain apps like itunes, or safari that dont catch the gestures first.

 

The 3 finger swipes are dependent on which key you binded for moving between your spaces. In my case I used option, command is also a good choice. Control is not since its only on one side of the keyboard.

3 finger Swipes – Move to Space in direction of swipe

Zoom Out, Zoom In – opens up spaces. I like this a lot, provides a quick way to see all of your spaces and select which one you want.

Rotate Left – Minimizes current window.

  ******* If you are having problems getting the global gestures to work, click on your desktop to bring up the finder, then click on the help menu. This should make them work again. Youll have to do this each time you restart. ******

Dock

Ok I said that dock would be in this post, but its gonna have to wait until my next once, since this one is already getting too long.

Also this is not the end of multiclutch. I have a lot more to show after I get into Fluid Apps, and Afloat.

Comments

[Andy]

How did you manage to get MultiClutch to recognize special keystrokes like the arrow keys?

I cannot get it to recognize them, instead of moves through the characters of the field as if I were typing...

Thanks!

[Adam M]

im not sure if you have tried this, but once you have the textfield in the 'Key Command' selected then you literally perform the shortcut you want to be mapped. So for example if i wanted 'Option' + 'Left arrow' you would have to press both of them at the same time. If you pressed option, THEN left arrow key it wont work. I was also confused by this when i first got it installed.

Hope this helps answer your question, if not let me know.