Have touchbar show vol up, vol down, brightness up, brightness down buttons by default

Solution 1:

Yes, you can go into System Preferences and set the default view for the Touch bar.

1. Open the System Preferences app.
2. Select the Keyboard option (third row, sixth item)
3. On the first tab (also called Keyboard), locate the dropdown for "Touch Bar shows" and choose "Expanded Control Strip".

Solution 2:

If you don't need the application-specific touch bar controls, you can configure it to always show the expanded control strip

Otherwise, you could try configuring something in BetterTouchTool

Solution 3:

If you're interested in further customization of your Touch Bar, I'd recommend trying out BetterTouchTool (BTT). You can add additional controllers, app icons, and actions to your Touch Bar (in addition to keyboard, trackpad, and mouse customizations too).

Their licenses are reasonably priced and they offer things like student discounts, which is actually how I obtained their software.

Here's their website, if you're interested in checking it out: https://folivora.ai/

Solution 4:

You can customize the Touch Bar to show the up and down buttons. However, if your primary goal is to be able to adjust brightness or volume in a single move (without having to open the slider) there is an awesome shortcut to do this:

Tap the button and hold, then drag side-to-side.

So for example, to adjust audio you can tap and then drag side to side to get the audio level you want. Same trick works with brightness. For me this is as fast as the old hardware keys and still keeps the controls compact when you aren't using them!