The Vergecast - The Elgato Stream Deck's endless buttons

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Today’s whole episode is about buttons. We’re talking about the Stream Deck from Elgato, a desk accessory that is basically just a bunch of buttons. We hear how people use their Stream Deck, how to hack it to do even more, and how to turn your old devices into something like it. Email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you. Call our Vergecast Hotline! 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virgecast, the flagship podcast of Mapable Buttons. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am standing on my back patio in front of the grill I just bought. It's a weird time to buy a grill right before the end of the summer, but I did it anyway because it was on sale and because this grill, the Weber Spirit E310, is the one everybody told me to buy. So I bought it. I like it so far. But the best thing about this grill is this button, Dignition, which turns on all the burners all at once.

I find myself yelling, I have created fire. single time I turn it on. It just feels powerful, you know? Today's whole episode is about buttons. We're going to spend the whole show talking about the stream deck. Not the game console, the steam deck, but the stream deck from Elgado, which is a desk accessory that is basically just a bunch of buttons. And it turns out a bunch of buttons is a pretty seriously powerful thing. We're going to hear how people use their stream deck, how to hack it to do even more, and how to turn your old devices into something kind of like it. But first, let me finish these burgers. that I came out here to grill.

Buttons are good and so are burgers. That's the takeaway. This is the Vergecast. See in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows,

and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like,

build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom. a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. So, like I mentioned a minute ago, this whole episode is going to be about a single device, the Elgado Stream Deck. If you've never seen one, it's basically just a panel of buttons.

Each one with a small square screen inside, it's about as wide as my thumb. And you can customize it however you want. It's like having a teeny tiny control panel for your computer. Like you're sitting in a music studio at one of those huge mixing boards, except much less chaotic. The stream deck is a pretty niche thing. It was built mostly for people who live stream on Twitch or platforms like that, and thus need to switch between cameras and streaming software and manage comment threads all simultaneously without spending all their time staring down at their keyboards.

It has big, bright buttons that you can feel and press, and that goes a long way towards helping that. You see tons of Twitch streamers actually using stream decks. They're really good for that. But the stream deck is actually much more than just a streaming thing. Because it's just a big blank slate of buttons, it's also one of the most fun, hacker-friendly, tinkerable things you're ever going to find. You can program it to do almost anything,

which is, in a way, both a little overwhelming to think about, and just incredibly fun. There's nothing it can do that you couldn't technically do with your mouse or keyboard or game controller. That's definitely true. but the stream deck takes all kinds of complicated computer stuff and just turns it into a button. And if there's one thing you should know about us here on the Vergecast, it's that we believe in buttons. Screens are great, but they're complicated. Software is great, but it's often badly designed and hard to figure out.

But buttons, everybody can figure out. So really, what this episode is actually about is buttons, and how a bunch of people we know and like are finding ways to put more buttons back into their lives. because computers are complicated and buttons are not. We're going to get deep into the weeds on how people use their stream deck and all these buttons, but let me just give you a few examples from my own stream deck. I have one button on mine that's connected to the lamp in my home office and just turns it on and off. Super helpful.

I have one that mutes or unmutes my computer so I don't have to find the button on my keyboard every time. I have a page full of buttons that just open links to Google Drive, to the app we used to record this podcast, to my calendar app, to a bunch of other stuff. I have a bunch of buttons linked to Spotify playlist so I can start playing what I want without even having to open the app. None of these things, you might note, are for live streaming, the stuff that the stream deck is ostensibly meant for. It's just useful in my life. I have six buttons on my stream deck mini, but they can be a thousand different things, and I'm really only scratching the surface. But enough about me.

Let's get into the show. The first thing we did was ask a bunch of Verge staffers how they use their own stream decks to see what kind of tips we could get from our own team. We got a lot of good stuff. Let's start with Sean Hollister. I'm a senior editor at The Verge in charge of finding gadgets. Sean has the stream deck mini, which is what I have, the one with six buttons. First thing I've got right here is I have a button that will allow me to dim my entire room's lights because I have home assistant hooked up to the stream deck.

And so I can go dim, I can go bright. I can be like, oh, I don't want any of that background light when I'm in the middle of the night playing games. That's perfect. Then I have a Burge button that will immediately be. popup theverge.com because why wouldn't you do that? Then I have a button that will allow me to not only shut down my computer, but toss it into sleep mode or reboot it or lock it. It's great. The fan will stop running. The lights will turn off because I got a button right there that does it. Dan Sefert, deputy editor at The Verge, also has the stream deck mini. The story is I bought the big one

that has like 30 something buttons on it. And then I realized I don't have 30 something things that do with this and it takes up way too much room on my desk. So I've reached. I've reached, returned it and I went all the way down to the six button one. Dan actually wrote a while back about how he uses his stream deck and that story convinced a bunch of other people on staff to buy one. I only ever use it for Zoom. And what I do with Zoom is there's a Zoom plug in for the stream deck and you can program buttons on there to mute to turn your camera on it off to bring the Zoom window forward.

So like if you've clicked off of it and then your boss is like, oh, hey Dan, what do you think about this? You click that button and boom, the zoom windows right in front of you again. And then I've got a shortcut that runs with MacOS to join my next Zoom meeting. But the most powerful button is the leave zoom button, which allows me to just push a button, and I leave the meeting. And I never have to, like, struggle with my mouse to find the leave meeting button and then click the little agree window that pops up or whatever.

You avoid the awkward five second. Let's all sort of wave at each other while we look for buttons on the. the thing. Yes, I just mash the button and the icon is a little running man. He's just running away from the meeting. The fact that the streamdex buttons are also teeny tiny screens makes this even better. So when you are muted, you've got a little line through the microphone, but if you push a button, you'll know that your bike is live. And so, you know, don't say bad things about your boss. Are there versions of this for other conferencing systems? We obviously use Zoom. Is there a thing for others? I don't believe there's one for teams. I've not really been able to find one for teams.

Surprise. We know there's not one for WebEx. We just kind of can. Assume there's not. But there is a plugin for Google Meet. Okay. So I've got a folder for Google Meet on my little stream deck that's like four pages down because we rarely use meat at the verge. But when I do need to use it, it does basically the same things. It's got a mute button, a video button, a hang up button. But then it also adds a raise hand button because that's a function that you use a little bit more Google Meet. Along with the Stream Deck Mini, there is, of course, the original stream deck, which has 15

hardware buttons that you can customize. What I've learned from this, is that I think the 15 button one is the right one. Liam James, the lead producer on the Vergecast, has one of those. I cannot imagine how I could possibly fill 32. I'm struggling with 15, but I have just a bit more than what would be comfortable on the six button one. Liam basically said that in life as a producer, you tend to do a lot of the same things over and over and over again.

So he wanted to automate that with the stream deck. So I'm making to do items all the time, but they're not always coming from one singular place. So after giving up this idea that to-dos need to be titled in a nice way, I found a way to just highlight text, it doesn't matter where it is, and hit a button, and it will be added as a new item in my to-do list.

That is a huge one. I use it probably 10 times a day. So it copies whatever text it's hovered on, opens up your to-do list app and paste it in as a new task? Yeah, it's actually like, you know, you don't need any add-on software. and my to-do app happens to have a global shortcut. So it's really just a copy and paste job, right?

So it's, you know, copy the text, hit the global command, paste, hit enter, done. I don't even see it. It's so fast. A lot of what he does on the stream deck is essentially activating an app called keyboard maestro, which allows you to automate almost anything on your Mac with keyboard shortcuts, which also means apparently Liam spends a lot of time sending emails to developers asking them for more keyboard shortcuts. One of my favorite ones, which is kind of very in the nerdy category, is going to my VNC server. I've got a headless Mac that runs Plex.

What's up, Alex? You know, I would love to have a keyboard shortcut. If you're the developer of screens 4 for Mac, please add a keyboard shortcut to go to your favorite VNC server. Keyboard Maestro just does all the hard work, and I can hit one button my stream deck, and I've got a window open that is showing me what's going on with that Mac. Liam also uses the stream deck pretty often for making this show. I do have a kind of like a podcast recording button, which just does a series of things. Turns off my air conditioner mutes any apps that are going to make noise. It starts an app that has a count up clock to keep you a Neli in line and not go too long on the segments.

Never works. So it's just kind of like a smart home parlance, like a scene that I have set up. Okay, now let's talk about the big Kahuna. There's the stream deck mini, the regular stream deck, and then the stream deck XL, which has 32 hardware buttons. I talked to Alice Newcomb Beale, who works on commerce and deals at the verge, who has her own Streamdeck Excel. I needed to know what all of those buttons are for. Honestly, a lot of the passive buttons on here are just kind of map to desktop functions, because even though I have three separate monitors and tons of windows spread out across that

entire real estate, so I can map different buttons to resize and move my windows or just show my desktop really quick. Currently, I have one that just allows me to minimize everything and also just empty my recycling bin whenever I need to. And I also have just a clock, basically, just another clock. I only have like four available to me, but I was like, okay, what else am I going to do with this space? All right, I guess I'll put a clock in there, sure. Alice also has another profile for when she plays Destiny, the hugely popular, hugely complicated video game. And that's where the Excel really comes into its own, filling all 32 of those buttons. The Destiny Community has done a lot to kind of fill gaps in quality of life improvements

where Bungee may have potentially dropped the ball. And one of those aspects is just in inventory management. Okay, so you have several characters with different loadouts and stuff you want to swap between them. And for a long time, you could do that with a browser-based app called Destiny Item Manager. Recently, that same functionality was brought to the stream deck with an app exclusively for Destiny Item Manager, which allows you to connect your account, connect your Destiny account, and program different loadouts to different buttons. There are some hiccups in the process, but for the most part, if you want to swap between

loadouts, all you have to do is press a button, which normally would require a lot of moving back and forth within the game, but instead it's been consolidated into just this single input. Yeah, that's awesome. And actually kind of a perfect example of what the stream deck I feel like is good for. Yeah, frankly, I was aghast when I first used that app and just like everything worked. I was like, wow, like that actually works. That's pretty amazing. Part of it, too, is just kind of exploring and experimenting with what you can do with the Steam Deck, with these optional macros. You know, like it was with me, it was sitting there just kind of idle for a long time. And then I kind of forced myself to explore the different apps and other functions that you can

tie to this device that you keep on your desk. Tom Warren, a senior editor at the verge, has a Stream Deck Excel as well. I got it pretty early on. And I think the folder support back then wasn't great. So that's why I got the giant one. He also uses his stream deck to play games, just like Alistair. So I have a button on here that basically is my Xbox mode. It's when I'm streaming on my exports.

You know, I'll have all the stuff where I can like change my lights to green to match the export sort of brand. I will change all my scenes in OBS to certain export stuff. Then I'll have a PC one which is PC focused and all that sort of stuff. So I do the sort of basics there. And then I'll have like a switch button where I'll I might press it and I'll be able to press, you know, BRB or live or anything on stream. But he also uses it in the most, like, obvious, as intended way as a soundboard. So if I'm hanging out in like Discord, I have like a bunch of meme sounds that I'll play when people say so much stupid.

Give me an example. What are the most used sounds that we're going to hear from you in Discord? If you want a fart sound, I can give you a fart sound. It's stuff like Simpsons characters. It's all very character-centric, so it would be like destiny characters. ninja saying, you know, what the hell did you say to me? Remember that line? The classic. After everyone showed me what's on their stream deck, I asked them what their wish list was.

What do they wish the stream deck could do that it can't? And Sean's request is either the worst idea or the best idea of the bunch. So let's start with that. I want to make a bubble wrap app. Okay. We are going to make a bubble wrap app for the stream deck where you push a button and it just pops a bubble. Because it feels like that when you touch the stream deck, all of these little keys, they have this delightfully squishy feeling to them, kind of like Bowar. And I'm like, we should go all the way.

You should make the sound. You should pop the bubble animation of the screen. I think we're going to build it. And here's Liam's idea, which he made me promise we would not cut out of the show. Top thing on my list that the stream deck needs is to go to sleep when my Mac goes to sleep. I don't understand this. I have many devices plugged into my Mac. that, you know, they're powered over USB.

And when I put my Mac to sleep, they go to sleep too. Stream Deck just lit up like Times Square all night long. That's kind of annoying. Dan had some thoughts as well. I've got two buttons set on one page. One for the space heater in my office to turn on, and one is for it to turn off. Because I couldn't figure out a toggle to make it just like switch state. I don't know if it's because whatever smart plug I'm using doesn't work with the stream deck

directly or whatever, but I had to like use two buttons. So there's a lot of room to improve on the smart home controls. And Tom had an idea, and I've been thinking about it for a while, and I still can't decide if I love it or I hate it. I would love if it could do notifications or if there was a new stream deck that just had like a notification LED bar or something. So it's like here's an email, you know, like well, that sort of stuff. It'd be useful not to have that necessarily on my monitor, but like off to the sides that I can check it. Okay, so we've been through all of this, and you might be thinking, David, this is all ridiculous overkill. You're just buying a gadget to do stuff your computer can already do. And people in general who don't like or understand

the stream deck argue just that. And that actually what you should do is learn keyboard shortcuts and use the mouse like a person and save money, you idiot. People have said all these things to me, and I think they're wrong. So I asked my stream deck owning colleagues how'd they'd respond. Keyboard shortcuts are great. I have plenty of them. Every now and then, I, I, I, I, try to remember what some of them are. I like that the stream deck just shows me the things that aren't baked into my muscle memory. The mental process to remember what your shortcut key is to do this special thing is already too much for me.

I just want to hit a button. You'd be surprised how much that time adds up over the course of a work week. The app list just keeps growing. And all of those apps are totally free after you've purchased the hardware that it needs. So that's kind of repressing, actually. Any keyboard shortcut is actually slower for me to do it because I have to put my hands on my keyboard, get oriented, and remember what the keyboard shortcut is or whatever. The stream deck makes it super easy to quickly push something that is one action and you don't have to worry about your spatial awareness as much. It just comes back to buttons, right?

The Verge loves buttons. I love buttons. The stream deck is a simple gadget, but it's also a hugely complicated one. And that's the thing that's so much fun about it. It makes those complicated things simple, but it also buries all kinds of functionality behind one press of one button. I think too much of life is spent in menus and scrolling around stuff and trying to figure out where things are, and I'd rather just have buttons. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll come right back to talk to a few more people who have taken the stream deck to even more impressive places and done way more than just improve their Zoom setup. We'll be right back.

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you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Welcome back. When I started doing research for this episode, I found a lot of people doing a lot of the things we just talked about. The stream deck is a great smart home controller.

It's really handy for playing music. It can get you off of Zoom, all that kind of stuff all over the place. But the more I dug, the more I found people who are using the stream deck to take some of the most complicated technology that exists and simplify it all the way down to a bunch of buttons. Like, here's how Simon, a YouTuber who makes a channel called Better Creating, uses his stream

deck to make video editing easier. For example, I've got a line of buttons in front of me, which are cut blade, which is just to chop a certain thing, cut the whole timeline, trim to start or trim to end. So when you're going through, you can kind of be skimming through with your mouse and just hitting those buttons, trimming the start of a clip, cutting something in half, trimming the beginning off it, and so on. So just that frictionless ability to press those three buttons in a row and zoom in and out on the two buttons below on the timeline means that I think I cut the speed that I would edit my A roll down in half. Again, this is one of the things I heard over and over

from people, both in and out of the verge. Using a computer now means constantly poking around menus and looking for options and then doing those same things over and over and over again. So instead of doing the long, complicated dance in garage band to split tracks and apply a compressor and add a little warmth in the EQ and then add a slate reverb, why not just hammer the button on your stream deck and have all of that happen automatically every single time? Sounds great, right? One of the groups taking this idea to its coolest extreme is this huge community of people who use the stream deck when they're playing Microsoft's flight simulator.

Flight Simulator is this, like, massively complicated game. That's the whole point, right? It's like you're flying a plane in every realistic way possible. That is both really fun and on a computer, kind of annoying. Here's how Robert Vanderposs, who says he's a big flight simulator fan, describes it. When I started flight simming, it really annoyed me how many buttons I had to press with my mouse to fully control the plane. I was really annoyed by that, so I thought, why not? because I already had a stream deck which I used for all kinds of shortcuts in my daily jobs,

things like starting teams, opening shortcuts, stuff like that. Robert and a bunch of other flight sim fans decided to stop relying on complicated controller moves and keyboard shortcuts, and they bought stream decks instead. Now, Robert is the developer of a piece of software called Flight Deck, which is actually super popular in the flight sim community. If you look in the plane, especially the big planes, you've got a lot of buttons, especially on your overhead panel. So you don't have to go there with your mouth.

to click it, you can just press a button that's right on your desk. And that's a lot quicker because you don't have to move your view. You can still keep your eyes on the sky, on whatever's in front of you, while executing functions in the plane. Flight Deck now has custom stream deck control sets for more than 30 different plans, which means more than 30 different complete button layouts depending on what you're flying. Robert said he's created more than 1,100 icons, hundreds of buttons and knobs and folders, and you can control every light and flap and camera angle and even turn on the seatbelt sign

and fly your whole freaking plane right from the stream deck. For example, if I take the 737 profile, then you've got an overhead panel folder, and that contains a lot of subfolders. So for every part of the overhead panel, there's a separate folder, and the folders are in order that you're most likely to use them. So when you're starting up the plane,

the things you do first, that are in that order. Because I make every profile for the 32 button stream deck and the 15 button stream deck. And the 15 button stream deck, that's always the big challenge because then you've got even less space to work with. Talking to people like Simon and Robert really started to open my eyes to what a device like the stream deck, which again is just a blank set of buttons can actually do. We live in a world now where if you think about it, everything is just an endpoint in software. So you can, for instance, use a stream deck to navigate.

around your Notes app like Simon does, because Notion and many other apps treat all of your pages just as you are else. You can put in the address of a page, link that to a button. So rather than navigating between pages in your sidebar of your Notion system, you can create icons that jump straight to key pages in your system. So actually I can integrate my home page and Notion with my content creation dashboard in Notion and my Google email or jumping to a website all in one page on StreamDeck. Or you can go even deeper and do what Den Delamarski did and actually figure out how the stream deck sends information in order to get it to send even more.

As a developer, I started running into the limitations where I wanted to do things that are developer-specific, like connecting to GitHub or anything beyond that. And that's when I realize that there's a lot of things that just, you know, I'm not sure if it's, you know, the stream deck is not necessarily tailored for developers, which makes sense. It's stream deck. It's not developer deck. Den told me he originally bought a stream deck for the same reasons we keep hearing here, to make calls, mute himself, that kind of stuff. But then he decided it wasn't powerful enough, and he wanted to write his own software for it. But that required understanding how exactly the stream deck actually works and talks to your computer.

I wanted to do more without necessarily using the Elgado software, because I wanted maybe to connect it to a different device that doesn't support it. So to do that, what I first started doing is there is a tool called Wireshark that basically monitors what happens on your network so you can capture network packets. But also, it's magic superpowers that actually capture the USB transport protocol. So if you're using a keyboard or the mouse

or any USB-connected device, it can capture what's happening. Long story short, Den then built his own software development kit, which lets you build more powerful things for the stream deck than Elgado's own tools would let you. The tool, or the library in this case, only basically allows you to connect to a stream deck and send command to it,

but it's up to you to still implement what you want to do. For example, I want to see my Nest cam, and I want to see, well, who triggered the alarm or something like that? And I would click the button, and it would instantly pop me into like a view or another thing that I did actually fairly recently was when I'd get an alert from Nest that something happened, I would just click a button that basically says capture. So it would capture the last like 30 seconds of the video and store it in the cloud. A lot of the stuff is entirely custom because it does not exist. It doesn't integrate yet. But by the power of me knowing how that API works behind the scenes, I just kind of stitched it all together.

And it's managed by the stream deck. And because every button has basically a mini screen, I can get a snapshot inside that button, however useless it is because it's very tiny. But to see, like, what is in front of my door. This goes back to that URL thing, right? Practically everything in our digital lives is an API or an SDK or a URL away, whether it's the button to leave a Zoom call or the live feed of your doorbell can. and people like Den are finding ever more clever ways to bring all of that stuff together.

Stack enough of those things on top of each other, and you can do just about anything. I should say, though, the stream deck software by itself doesn't make this as easy as it should, and programming your stream deck can still kind of feel like you're programming a computer. But that's going to get better as developers build more of these plug-in-play systems, and as more developers break the whole system like Den did. Like I did with The Verge, I asked almost everybody I talked to, everybody I talked to what their wish list items were, what they want from the stream deck that it can't currently do. In this case, almost everybody had hardware ideas. Some people wanted more buttons.

Simon wanted one that didn't have any cables and maybe worked over Bluetooth. Robert told me he wanted one where there's no divider between the buttons, so it looks more like a coherent screen rather than a bunch of individual things. And everybody had ideas about how it should be designed. But one thing I heard a bunch of was that this thing is super powerful and versatile already. So what new superpower could it get that might unlock even more? Hopefully in the future release of Stream Deck we're going to see at least, you know, like throw Raspberry Pi in it. Like just, you know, put an SD card maybe that does some, you know, save profiles locally.

But that's for the future. For now, I'll have to work around these constraints by creatively writing software and decline computer. After talking to all of these people, I honestly love the Stream Deck even more. No two people use it exactly the same way, but it makes this complicated technology feel simple and just gives you more control over how things work and how you use them. You can tinker with it to your heart's content or just set up a few actions, run your computer from your little control panel and never think about it again.

There are no wrong answers, right? It's just buttons. Buttons are great. And if you don't like them, change it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then come right back and figure out how you can get the best of the stream deck, all the automation and control and simplicity without actually needing to buy a stream deck. Because remember, it's all about buttons.

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Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration. and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

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That's cloud.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash Vergecast. Welcome back. Remember how I said at the top that this episode wasn't really about the stream deck?

Here's what I mean. The stream deck is many things. Many, many, many things. But it's also kind of expensive. The little six button stream deck mini I have is 80 bucks. The regular 15 button model is 150 bucks. And the stream deck XL and its 32 buttons

will run you $250. That's a lot of money just to do some stuff your computer can already do. So let's see if there's a cheaper way, maybe a way to repurpose a device you already own, or some software that can do some of the awesome automation and simplification that the stream deck does. Even if we lose the buttony feel of the whole thing, can we at least get some of the goodness of the stream deck for a lot less money? That's the question I posed to Alex Kranz, and she went off to try and find out. And now she's back to tell us. Hi, Alex. Hi, David. How are you? I'm terrific. How are you? I'm excited to talk about key rematch.

mapping software. More than you think. Actually, I feel like knowing you as I do, the answer is very high. Yeah. I feel like I'm on brand with that. Are you a stream deck person? No, but I really, I really want one, but like I feel like it's a bridge too far, like socially. You just, you're not ready for the lifestyle is what you're saying. Yeah, like, I'm not ready for somebody to come over to my house and be like, what is on your desk? Because my desk is the first thing people see in my home. So I try to keep it like fairly like useful because I'm a giant nerd and I'm sitting at it all day. but also like I don't want people to judge me and I feel like I'll get judged with a stream deck. No judgment to any of our colleagues and listeners who use a stream deck, including Dan,

who just uses it for Zoom. It's, yeah, I mean, listen, these are our people. This is what this episode is about. But your job was to find people a way to do the same kinds of things that you want to do on a stream deck without actually having to buy a stream deck, which I feel like is a very useful exercise. and I'm realizing an especially useful exercise for you who might want to do some of these, like, nerdy automation things, but don't want a giant piece of hardware sitting on your desk. What I really wanted to do, and I have not yet figured out yet, is I want, like, one that'll work with, like, a Kendall or an e-reader, just, like, repurpose one of those old E-ink devices. So it's like my calendar and also, like, turns off my Zoom camera.

Oh, I like that idea. But that doesn't exist yet. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got your hopes up. Well, the E-ing streamed out. is a thing that needs to exist. I wasn't going to bring that up, but that is a thing that needs to exist.

And I like this idea very much of using an old Kindle because I have like five old Kindles that are just around and I would love to have a better use for them. But for most people, you're going to be better off using your number pad because a lot of people have been trying to figure out what to do with the number pad if you're not like in living in spreadsheets all of your life. Okay. So Windows has one called AntSoft's key remapper. If you click on the website, you will be like, why did I travel back to 2007?

It's bad. Yeah, it's real bad. The software is also pretty dense. But it's like $15 to $30. Like you get the license. You can also do some rebapping just like in Windows. So you don't necessarily need to go to that. But if you want like app-specific stuff, AntSoft.

For Macs, it's a little easier. You can do stuff like I use, I've got Alfred. I'm a huge Alfred fan. I gave up Quicksilver a decade ago. I've been Alfred ever since. You can also use, like, the automator shortcuts. Like, Apple's been building this stuff in from the beginning. And then there's, like, the old school, yes, right down to the website, keyboard maestro.

It's like $36. You can do it all. It is much like Ansoff, not pretty. This is not a place where, like, the developer is really focusing on UI, which makes sense, right? Like, this is for people who just want, like, really quick button to turn off their zooms and do other quick automations. That's fair. Well, and I think, I will say, the number pad, like, off to the right of your keyboard is a very useful place for that. But also what I've heard a bunch of people say is that the function keys

are a thing that everyone should be remapping, which I think is very smart. The downside is you have to like remember what they all are because there's nothing about the F3 key that like tells you anything of consequence. But you should absolutely remap all of those to be like global universal shortcuts to whatever you want because otherwise you are never going to touch those keys. I was going to do that, but I'm on a happy hacking keyboard. So I have to already do that just to get to the F3. Like I have to use the function keyboard keys. But it's really. good because on Macs, it's super easy to be like, oh, I want a universal mute button. I want a universal launch a specific app button. Like, you can just do all of that. Like a lot of this

stuff, I think one of the reasons is software you're seeing is so old is because a lot of the stuff you can now just kind of do in Windows and Mac. So it's really nice. But if you do want to repurpose an old gadget, like a tablet or a phone for this, there is the stream deck app. It, in theory, is the stream deck, but for your phone, it is trash. The app is bad. It charges you, I think, four bucks a month to use it. It's super slow. It's like the closest thing to what the stream deck could be on your phone, right?

Like, it's just, it looks like buttons, and you press them, and things happen. But it's slow, and it's bad, and it's stupid, and you shouldn't use it. Like, the stream deck software is not, like, famously fast and great anyway, but it is the worst version of itself on phones, which is a real. bummer. I would not use that unless like forced to for some reason. You get just enough to be like, oh, I get the potential of this. Clearly I need dedicated hardware. There is another app called Touch Portal, I think, which seems to be the deeply nerdy one that people really like. This is the one that a lot of people enjoy and they actually like it more than a stream deck. It's just finicky.

I feel like it's like mad finicky for all the reasons that people like to tinker with their stream deck. this gives you even more stuff to do. It's like Plex, right, in that you like run it from your computer and use it from your device? You're getting a server and that server is listening for a client software. And the client software, you can put it on your old phone, your old Amazon fire tablet that you've had for a billion years and you probably need to just recycle. You can do them all there. And there are a lot of people, like especially a lot of streamers who are like, oh yeah,

touch portal is the way to go. And I think that's just because, like, I really want something that I can, like, dig in and customize and get really weird about and make individually mine and 3D print a little case for my old phone and do all of that. So I'm going to go touch portal. The thing it has going for it is that it works everywhere. It's like it's on Mac and Windows. I think it's on Android and iPhone. Like, it does the thing for all the places, which is great. It's so insane to me that the stream deck has not solved this problem. Like, as we're talking about this, I'm getting angrier at how bad the. Dream Deck app is, because the thing is, like, we've been talking about this for years, right? There's that question of, like, what do you do with your old devices, right? Like, I have an iPad from, like, six years ago that, like, won't install software anymore, but still runs fine. And, like, the perfect version of those things is that I, like, use it as a thing on my wall

to, you know, control my smart home or whatever. And if I could have one of those that is, like, a remote control for my computer, that's the dream. It's so simple. I want that. I would even happily, like, connect it. Like, Apple should make this thing. and it would like iCloud into my computer and it would all work fine.

You just have to hack it just one step more than it seems like you should have to. And that's frustrating. But people do love touch portal. So what do I know? Yeah. People love touch portal. They've made it work. There's also another one that's a little easier than touch portal.

But it's also only runs on Android, only runs on Windows. This is for the people who are already like, I really like to get in there and customize my entire workflow, the appearance of my workflow. Every little bit of it. And that's metric, matrix. It's like the singular of matrix. It's just one matrix, two matrix. Matrix. That seems right.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's totally free. It's a little bit more paired down. But because it's more paired down, it's going to be like easier to set up. You're not going to have to worry about like getting all, everything just right. Because like Touch Portal, part of its appeal, I think, to a lot of people is that you can do so much. It does give you so many things.

But it's kind of like the first time you play Skyrim, go back. It's 2011. You've put Skyrim into like your PC or your 360 or whatever. And you're like, I'm going to play this game. This is going to change my life. And then it's like so much stuff. And you're like, okay, well, do I like become the dragon person, the dragonborn and like shout my way to victory? Do I go start like this stop like these weird Romans who are doing their thing?

Do I go build a house? Do I adopt a child? Do I become a blacksmith? Like there's so much going on. And you're like, I don't, for me, I just like stop playing for a year and a half because it overwhelmed me. And touch portal is kind of like that. There's so much choice that you're like, oh, I don't know where to start. So you want to come in like with a plan.

As we talk to people through this whole show, one of the things that seems like the key is to any of these devices is start with like a thing. And it's like, okay, I'm going to set this up. It's going to do this one thing for me. And then in the process, you like learn how to use it. You fix some of the weird bugs. And then you like slowly start to add other stuff. But you need like the one problem you're trying to solve. Because for me, like, I bought a stream deck and was like, this seems neat.

I wonder what I'll do with it. And then it just did nothing for. for a long time. But then when I was like, oh, I'll make it run the light in my office. All of a sudden it was like, okay, now I have a reason to put this in front of me. And then it opened up the rest of everything to me. The fanciest light switch on the point. I mean, could I reach six inches out of frame here and turn off the light? Yes, I could. But it's much easier when I have my stream back. Well, have you seen, like, did you guys talk about a lot of the different boutique keyboard

makers make little number pads and they have little like volume dials on them? I was going to bring this up actually because one of the things we should say is that For people who are thinking, like, oh, maybe I'll do like the keyboard maestro or the number pad stuff. One thing you can buy pretty cheap is a dedicated number pad that could act as just a set of dedicated buttons for you. Yeah, you could do that. And then you could use one of these like keyboard maestro or Ansoft's key remapper or just honestly, Mac and Windows do a pretty great job of this stuff nowadays. It just do it. That's been my other way.

And that feels like a little more socially acceptable than the stream deck with its light up keys, which I really love. that's probably like the way I'm going. Because then like you've got the volume button instead of having to like hunt for the volume in my menu bar or hotkey it. A dial is clutch. But that's a whole other accessory roadmap. We will go down some other day.

It's the same thing. It's got the number pad and the dial all in one. So that's kind of where I'm leaning now. That makes sense. And we should say before we go that if you are a person who wants to use the stream deck for its actual like intended use, which is to like live stream yourself, you're actually in much better shape because there are some really good apps out there that plug into OBS, which is the streaming software that everybody use, that actually works really

well because there's like a big market for that. It's a thing a lot of people do. So if you want to like run your Twitch stream from your tablet, like deck board is supposed to be pretty good. I think up deck is supposed to be pretty good. Touch portal works really well for this. There's one called like stream puppy that I was reading about that I just like inherently don't trust, but supposedly people like it. I don't know. That kind of stuff is like more functional. So if you want to stream, you're in good shape. But if you want the like wacky productivity stuff, that we're about here at the verge, your kind of host. We're doing it all wrong.

We're like, none of us to Twitch stream. I know. It's really true. Okay, so we're all buying E-ink, Kindles, and hacking them to run stream decks. And when we do, we will be back and we will report on it because that will change my life. It's going to be a lot of tears. It's going to be amazing. All right. Alex, thank you.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Talk to you later. All right. And with that, it's time for me to press the button on my stream deck that turns off my microphone because I have one of those, and it's awesome. That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening.

As always, there is tons more coverage on the stream deck and everything else we talked about at Theverge.com, and you can also follow all of us on Twitter. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings,

buttons that will play the Vergecast on your stream deck, anything else, you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com or call the Vergecast hotline 866 Verge1. Alex Neelana will be back on Friday to talk about Twitter whistleblowers, House of the Dragon, e-bikes, and much more. See you then. Rock and roll.