The developer blog for BetterTouchTool, a Mac utility for custom gestures, shortcuts, and Touch Bar configuration.
HN commenters recommend BetterTouchTool for custom trackpad gestures, a third mouse button, and Touch Bar setups, and note its two-year update pricing.
Someone else mentioned Keyremap4macbook (https://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/). There's a huge amount of customization there, enough that you should be good to go just by looking through the options there. My favorite is remapping Caps Lock to Left CTRL. Then you can remap Left CTRL to be escape by itself, and CTRL+<yourkey> when pressed with other keys. It's very handy in Vim, especially.
A couple other recommendations, however:
BetterTouchTool: The MBP trackpad has a surprising amount of complexity in terms of recognizing gestures. BTT adds to that . http://www.boastr.net
Keyboard Maestro: Scripting and advanced keyboard shortcuts. Includes support for per-app shortcuts, which is pretty phenomenal. http://www.keyboardmaestro.com
TextExpander: Less practical when you're programming, but TE can be great for automating things you write often (email address, email responses, URLs, etc.) http://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/
BetterTouchTool (https://www.boastr.net/) is kinda like an AutoHotKey for OS X -- but on top of custom keyboard shortcuts, it also allows you to configure custom trackpad gestures.
It's easily saved me 100+ hours -- a half-second at a time, 400 times a day. And probably a couple cases of RSI, a couple inches of finger contortion at a time.
The economy of motion is as far beyond keyboard shortcuts as keyboard shortcuts are beyond hunting around with a mouse. It's crime more people don't use it.
Starting to go off topic but have you checked out BetterTouchTool[1]? It's not _just_ another window tiling app for the Mac. It also lets you conveniently remap trackpad gestures and taps, 3rd party mice (yes you can remap your side buttons if you want), keyboard shortcuts, etc. The coolest thing is that if you really want, you can also restrict your remaps to work only in certain applications. I've been using it for years and just wanted to share.
[1]: https://www.boastr.net
For a third button you can get BetterTouchTool[1] and set up an event for the Tackpad under "Global". I have tapping the top right of the track pad (about a 1cm square) trigger the third mouse button. Perhaps it's not as great as a real middle mouse button (can't middle drag, real pain for GIS and CAD software) but it does handle opening links in new tabs and closing tabs via middle click.
[1]: http://www.boastr.net/
BetterTouchTool seems to be coming to the rescue here.
https://www.boastr.net/second-touchbar-alpha-available/
I haven't played with it yet, but it looks like as long as the thing you want to do has a hotkey you can use this to make touchbar button to do it whenever you are in that particular app.
There's an app called BetterTouchTool that lets you create your own contextualized Touch Bar buttons that can execute any command(s). It's one of their recent updates: https://www.boastr.net/second-touchbar-alpha-available/
Does anyone know of other apps that let you take control of the touch bar?