But that’s not all: if I’m working with two displays at once (for instance, when I’m recording podcasts), I can hit the same shortcut to shuffle the current window back to the primary display because BetterTouchTool’s action is designed to move windows to the “next” monitor, so it’s not specific to the Luna Display one. Now, whenever I want to move a window that has opened on the primary display (the UltraFine) to the Luna Display, I just need to press ⌃⌘L and the window will instantly move. As shown below, all it takes is creating a new shortcut in the ‘Keyboard’ category of the app, giving it a hotkey, and picking the action from a list of predefined steps: In my case, all I had to do to make it easier to fling app windows across displays was use BetterTouchTool’s ‘Move Window to Next Monitor’ action. If you’re interested in this kind of utility, take your time to read through the documentation and play around with a few examples invest enough time into learning BetterTouchTool and what it can accomplish, and you’ll end up with a highly personalized macOS environment that can save you several minutes every day. It’s like Keyboard Maestro, but with a simplified interface that’s designed to let you quickly program your own shortcuts. Whether you need to launch apps, trigger a specific menu item of an app, control windows, or run AppleScripts, BetterTouchTool can do it.
It’s nearly impossible to sum up what BetterTouchTool can do in a single paragraph, but I’ll try: with BetterTouchTool, you can associate almost any action on your Mac with a custom keyboard shortcut, gesture, mouse click, or Touch Bar button. To fix this problem, I’ve turned to BetterTouchTool. To the best of my knowledge, by default macOS does not provide any keyboard shortcuts to cycle an app window through multiple displays, which, as I’ve noted in this article, is the most annoying limitation of using Luna Display as a secondary display for your Mac.
Once again, it took me a few days to get accustomed to using ⌥Tab after years of muscle memory with a different keyboard shortcut, but I prefer the extra versatility granted by Command-Tab Plus now.
This way, when I access the Mac from Luna Display on the iPad I’m free to use either the iOS app switcher 5 or the Mac one. The app is called Command-Tab Plus, and it looks like this after my customizations:Įffectively, at this point I have two separate app switchers on my Mac mini – the default one and Command-Tab Plus. So I went in a different direction and settled on a third-party app switcher that mimics the default Apple one but extends it with some additional options, including customizations for its appearance and keyboard shortcut. As far as I know, there is no way to remap the default keyboard shortcut for the app switcher on macOS that doesn’t involve installing system modifications I’m not comfortable with. Replacing the ⌘Tab app switcher was trickier. I can now use both iOS search and Alfred from Luna Display on the iPad – which is nice when I want to put an iOS app on top of Luna Display in Slide Over mode. It took a while to get used to opening search on the Mac with this new hotkey after years of ⌘Space, but the trade-off has been worth it. I’ve always preferred Alfred to Spotlight, so I turned off Spotlight’s keyboard shortcuts completely and started using ⌥Space to trigger Alfred’s search window, which does not conflict with iOS’ ⌘Space shortcut. If you want to keep using Spotlight but simply change its keyboard shortcut, click on it and record a new one from the keyboard. To do this, go to System Preferences ⇾ Spotlight ⇾ Keyboard Shortcuts and disable ‘Show Spotlight Search’. I had to replace them if I wanted to use the Mac’s search feature and app switcher from Luna Display on the iPad.ĭisabling Spotlight was easy. Specifically, when I started using Luna Display, the keyboard shortcuts to activate Spotlight search and the app switcher ( ⌘Space and ⌘Tab, respectively) kept triggering those functionalities on the iPad rather than being passed over to macOS. Luna Display as a Secondary Display: Keyboard ShortcutsĪs a first order of business, I realized I needed to change some of the keyboard shortcuts that were in conflict between macOS and iOS.ĭespite the fact that it creates the illusion that you’re using macOS on an iPad, it’s important to remember that Luna Display is still an iPad app, and as such it responds to default keyboard shortcuts that are shared system-wide across all apps on iOS.