Qfyilyi

I'm looking for a solution to mute my mic in Discord that I can then add to my touchbar via bettertouchtool.

BTT cannot send key combos to Discord for whatever reason. As far as I can tell I have two options.

1. Use applescript to activate the Discord window, send the key press, then hide the window. This works, but flashing the application up for a moment is annoying. Worse when it's on another desktop as it will flip desktops over and then back.




2. Use applescript to click the top menu to click the Discord menu, and work down through the UI elements to click the Mute button.

I'm not experienced enough with applescript to make the second option work, but I think it could work. Using UI browser I was able to get the path to the UI element:

How can I make this work? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Firstly, well done for exploring and doing your own research with which you've come armed to ask how it can be applied to form a solution. It makes it so much easier to provide useful help.

With that in mind, the screenshot from UI Browser is immensely helpful, as it literally lays out the hierarchy of UI elements that we need to traverse in order to reach the target menu item and issue a click via AppleScript:

tell application "System Events"

    tell application process "Discord"

        tell menu bar 2

            tell menu bar item 1

                click



                tell (a reference to menu 1)

                    repeat until it exists

                        delay 0.2

                    end repeat

                    tell menu item "Mute"

                        click

                    end tell

                end tell

            end tell

        end tell

    end tell

end tell

However, there is a known and well-queried/documented/complained-about phenomenon of an irritating 5-second inexplicable delay between the first click that shows the menu, and the second click that selects the menu item. This isn't specific to Discord, but seems to apply to menu bar icon menus.

Various solutions have been put forward to workaround this, but I won't go into them in detail because none of them are a) reliable, b) without side-effects, or c) clean to implement. You'll undoubtedly do a quick search yourself, and come upon the most common solution, which is to kill the System Events process between the first two click events. But you'll find upon further reading that later on, users report that this method stops working; and in the interrim, causes System Events to throw other, unrelated errors where it didn't before.

Therefore, this solution for you is bittersweet, I'm afraid. I've shown you how to AppleScript your way to the menu item you want; but the end result may not be any more appealing than your first option.

EDIT: Possible Non-AppleScript Solution

Having downloaded a copy of Discord myself to see what's what, I first note that my version of the application has no such menu bar icon to speak of. It must be a setting I haven't gleaned upon.

What I did glean upon, however, is the option to set a user-defined keybinding that triggers one of a selection of functions, one of which being a toggle for the mic mute:

Here, I set up one to bind ⌘⌥⇥ to Toggle Mute. As you'd expect, it works within the application. Surprisingly, it works outwith the application too, when it doesn't have focus, and even when it's minimised. Even more surprisingly, it worked when Discord was resident on a separate desktop (space), and at no point did the Discord app need to attain focus or the active desktop be switched away from.

I believe this is exactly the solution you're after - a hotkey that operates globally on your system to mute your Discord microphone.