MIDI-macro

I got a brand-new MIDI controller with plenty of potentiometer knobs, and figured that they’d be quite useful also for some image processing tasks, like fine-tuning the exposure and sharpness. I didn’t find any direct support for this (though some might be coming up in 3.8) but I found this project in github. So I decided to practice some golang and improve that to fit my needs.

First I configured darktable to have some obscure shortcut keys for the operations I needed, for example like so:

I.e. modifier Shift+Ctrl+Alt and any keys possible. For each slider to manipulate, I used 3 keys: increase, decrease and reset.

Then I configured the expanded midi-macro tool which you can find here with setup instructions:

• MIDI-macro in github

Here’s some example configuration:

port: "Launchkey MK3 25:Launchkey MK3 25 MIDI 1"
keys:
    - name: "42"
      type: "button"
      task: "xdotool,key,ctrl+alt+shift+c"

    # Knobs
    - name: "23"
      type: "knob"
      task: "keyPress"
      key_up: "ctrl+alt+shift+e"
      key_down: "ctrl+alt+shift+d"

So the reset button is considered a “key” (just on-off action), which invokes the xdotool to relay the keypress to an application. The increase/decrease keys are configured as a knob (which does use the xdotool internally as well), so that you can specify which keypress is sent when knob is turned either up or down.

And the result works like this: