Touchbar Not showing F1 - F12 keys on specific Application

[renegadeandy]

Hi everyone.

I have a nice new macbook pro - and I have a Java application which has a bundled mac os launcher.

I want for this particular application - the F1 - F12 keys to show by default on the touch bar.

I have gone into System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts - FN keys and added the application via its supplied launcher to the list of applications.

However due to the nature of this application (java) - the program launches as "IBM Host On-Demand".


I have this added to my shortcuts for FN keys here:



The application is installed here /Applications/HostOnDemand:




When the application launches it seems to 'start another application' which I believe is WSCachedLoader - which is likely some Java Unix process kicked off by the 'Host On-Demand' launcher seen above.



This appears to match up closely to a jar in the /Applications/HostOnDemand folder:



The long and short of this is - that when I launch Host On-Demand, the F keys do not show up on my keyboard. I cannot add WSCachedLoader2.jar to the F keys shortcut list of apps - presumably because it is not a launcher type.

Any ideas on how I can make this application 'recognised' by the Keyboard Shortcuts Fn type so that when I launch it, the F keys appears in my touchbar?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

That particular part of System Preferences only recognizes Mac apps and if you could arbitrarily add the Java executable, that would make this work, but not so here since as you've surmised, the Host On Demand is just a wrapper around the actual JAR (Java) application that gets launched..

In this case, not sure there is a work-around short of holding down the FN key to the see the function keys..

 

[renegadeandy]

I can't help but feel there has to be a solution here. Is there some kind of programmable interface to the touchbar? Maybe I could write my own 'listener' which would watch which window has focus and then manually invoke the F Keys to show up?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

There is absolutely an API for the TouchBar which is used by many applications to show you custom icons and data.