Creating a multi action macro button

Getting started with Touch Portal

Touch Portal is capable of making complex and powerful buttons. One of the core aspects of this is the ability to stack actions to make a button do multiple things with one press.

Step 01: Adding our first action to our button

We start by adding an action that will start up an application. In this case it will start the Windows calculator.

While this is already very handy, we can do much more if need be.



Step 02: Adding a sequence of actions

In this guide we want to start the calculator and then right away do some calculations. But we cannot do that yet. First we need to make sure the calculator application is running when we do that sequence of key presses and for this we need a bit of logic.

We need to add a wait timer function in between which can be found in the logic section of the action list. Click on this action to add it to the list of action the button will executed. We set the wait time to 2 seconds which will be enough to let the calculator application start and take focus. If you are on a slower computer, just increase the timer to fit the situation.

This is also a good moment to explain a bit on the action flow of a button. When you add actions in the list of the ON PRESS category, they will be executed in order. This means the first action will be triggered and when this has been done, the second will be executed and so on. Do understand that the action is executed but it does not wait for any result. In our case it has triggered the start of the snipping tool application and continues on to the next action in the queue. It does not wait for the application to actually be fully started. This is why we need the timer for this in our current button.

When the Wait action has completed the wait time, the next action will execute. In our example we do a virtual key press of the key "3". The calculator app receives this key press and will act as if you would have pressed that key on your keyboard. So the first part of the calculation in the calculator app has been done. In sequence we press the "+" key, the "8" key and to finish the calculation the last action triggered is the "enter" key which will give the result of our little sum within the calculator app.

End Result

When we press this button it will now start up the calculator. It will go through the Flow of actions and it will calculate 3+8.

This shows the core power of multi action macro buttons on Touch Portal.

Although the virtual key presses are very powerfull, some application do not accept them. For Windows and MacOS we have added the Low Level Key presses which simulate a key press on a lower system level which is accepted by more applications. This system supports (or better said requires) specific keyboard setups per language. You have to set it to which kind of keyboard you are using.
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