So lately I was looking at the Elgato Stream Deck for creating keyboard macros, controlling music playback and gaming and it occurred to me that this could be really useful with Obsidian as I have a lot of shortcuts mapped (which I struggle to remember)!
The only problem is that the Stream Deck is expensive. I almost consigned the whole idea to the scrap heap before stumbling on an app called Touch Portal (PC & Mac) which provides the same functionality as the Stream Deck but on an old phone or tablet.
So this weekend I created my first layout for Obsidian complete with custom icons and it works brilliantly. Here’s my layout:
I have an old 7 inch tablet positioned to the left of my keyboard and use it mostly to utilize the features of the Advanced Tables Plugin. In addition, I also find it useful for toggling the sidebars and splitting/closing panes. You could of course map buttons to anything you like as long as you have a keyboard shortcut bound for it.
If anyone is interested then I’d be happy to share my layout and/or custom icons. You would need to edit the buttons to use whatever keyboard shortcuts you have defined though (which wouldn’t take long).
For those interested, Touch portal runs on iOS 9.3+ or Android 4.1+, is free to use with a limited number of buttons (16) but only costs ~$12 for the Pro version which gives up to 110 buttons per page and unlimited pages that can be linked together. You can find out more from https://www.touch-portal.com/.
