Master keyboard shortcuts WITHOUT remembering any of them
How to use a Stream Deck or Touch Portal device to use Vectric keyboard shortcuts WAY EASIER. This will work with Aspire, VCarve, Cut2D, and any other programs on your computer.
Want to learn more??
Click the link below to take your Vectric skills to the next level!
Video Transcript:
In this video, I'm going to show you how to access all of the Vectrics, keyboard shortcuts with one click of a button and never having to remember a single one again. And the way we will accomplish that is with a external device called a stream deck. And if you are not familiar with what a stream deck is, it allows you to put custom buttons onto a physical keypad. When you press the button, it will do whatever you want it to on the screen. So you can associate all these buttons with different keyboard shortcuts within Vectric software. So every available keyboard shortcut you can put as a physical button that you can press onto this pad. And you are not limited to how many buttons you have here because you can see you can go to several pages,
as many as you want, and create a custom button on every single page. You can also have folders inside of buttons as well as set up different profiles for different users or different applications. And before we get started, I want to show you the three different devices I tried for this and the pros and cons to each one. I will have affiliate links to the two on the left and I will also have a link to the one on the right down below in the description. So the very first one I tried is called the Stream Deck two. So I think I actually paid around $118 for that while it was on sale. But the obvious limitation to this one is it only has 15 physical buttons. At first I thought that was going to be enough. But once I started setting it up, I realized I had to scroll through six different pages to get all the shortcut keys in there that I wanted. So that just made it really annoying when you had to get a keyboard shortcut that was on a page that was far away. So it is possible to use this, but I would highly recommend getting the larger one because it is a little bit annoying having to scroll through so many pages. One thing I do like about this is it does have a removable base, so you can either lay it flat on your desk or use the base, and the base has many different angles that you can adjust it to. So you can either go real low with it or you can raise it up higher. And this is just a simple USB connection to your computer. All right. The next device I tried was a free option. And this is an app that you can download on your computer or tablet, and it's called Touch Portal. Now, the pro to this is it's a free app that you can download on a tablet or phone.
But the con to that is for the free option. It only allows you to use eight buttons if you have more than eight buttons, but you most likely will. They do have a fee of around $14, I believe, to upgrade to the pro version. I did not try that pro version. I only tried the free version, but overall it seems to work pretty well. The only thing I don't like is you need a tablet or phone constantly next to your computer to be able to use it. And then you're also going to have to keep that device charged to be able to use it with your computer as well. So for me, that's a little bit annoying.
And I also don't like doing the touchscreen. I like the physical button because it's a little bit more reliable. But if you already have a phone or a device that you can use for this and you want to save a little bit of money, you can go with this option. And I will also note that stream deck has their own app as well. But this one, they want you to pay a monthly or annual subscription,
which I did not like at all. So the Touch portal was a little bit better because that one seemed to be a one time fee. All right. And then the last option, which is the one I like the most, is the Stream Deck XL. So this is basically the same exact thing as the stream deck two, except this one obviously has much more buttons. This one has a 32 physical buttons that you can use. And then, of course, you can also do multiple pages and all the buttons that I fit on six pages of the smaller one, I was able to fit in two pages of this one. So I like that much better. When you can just go to the second page and see all of the buttons and you only have two pages to go in between. For me, that is just much more convenient and it looks much better. The other thing I like about this one is it seems to be much higher quality than the smaller one. The base seems much more heavier dutier to your and it also conceals the cord much easier. So this one comes out the back, whereas the previous
one comes out the top, which is not a big deal, but it just looks much cleaner for this one here.
The base is not adjustable, but it does remove so you can lay it flat on your desk, which still looks very nice at the angle that it's at. Or you can mount it to the base and have it standing upright like that. For me, those two options are perfect. I don't really need anything in between those two. And at the time of making this video, this one retails around $250, but I was able to buy it on sale for $238. So for around $50 more, I would highly recommend the stream Deck XL if you can do it within your budget. If not, my second recommendation would be the stream deck two. And then finally, if you're really on a budget and you already have a device available, I would recommend the touch portal. So those are the three options. I'm sure there's many more options, but those are the only ones I've tried personally. And for this video I'm going to be mostly focusing on the stream deck XL because that one is my favorite and the one that I will be personally using. All right, so now let's look at how to set these up. First, let's quickly look at how to set up the touch portal. So to do that, you just go to your app store on your device in the search, just search for touch portal, and then just click on that to install it. And then once you install it, you can open it up. And obviously I already have this set up, but this will be a blank screen when you start up. And from here you have to connect it to your computer and that connects over Wi-Fi. And for me it hooked up automatically when I set it up on the computer.
And also all of the buttons are set up on the computer. So all you have to do on your device is install it and then go over to your computer to do the rest of the setup. So let's head over to the computer and to set up touch portal on your computer. Make sure you're using the computer that you want to control. And you first going to go to touch Dash Portal icon. I'll have that link down below in the description, but you're going to click downloads and go to Touch Portal that will take you down the page to the downloads and then just choose whatever computer you're using.
So if you're using windows, you're going to click here, download, and then just go through the process to download and install that, and that will give you this software here. So when you first open the software, it's going to have you connect to your device and it will walk you through those steps. But they have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network for that to work. And if at any time you get stuck or need extra help, they do have a hope and guide section to give you further instructions. But once you get all set up, you're going to be at the page section and this will be a blank screen when you first start. But as you can see, I already set up eight of these buttons. Now this is the free version, so I'm only allowed to do eight. It will not let me do any more than eight. To get more than eight buttons, you have to upgrade to the pro version and then you have to pay, I think, $14 for the lifetime fee. So it is fairly reasonable price. So if you want to do this option, you can. But as you can see, once you do have more available buttons, you can change how many buttons are visible on the screen. You can also change the layout from horizontal to vertical, and then you can also add and customize buttons as you wish. So let me delete one of these buttons. I'll show you how to set it up and you can actually set up one button and you can also copy and paste buttons. You can also import and export buttons. So to set up a button, you'll see you'll have a blank spot. Now that there's no button, you just click on that spot and that will open up your control to set it up. And there's many different things you can do for each of these buttons. I have not looked through all of these yet, but you can get very customize
with these buttons for a simple better keyboard shortcut. You're just going to use this option here where it says input and virtual key press. Click on that and that will ask you what button you want it to use. So you can either click on the button down here or you can actually type it on your keyboard. So in this case, I'm going to do the redo keyboard shortcut, which is control Y.
So I'll press control and Y on my keyboard and that will bring it up here and then click add.
And now you'll see when you press the key, it will press the control Y key. So now the button is all set up, but we also need it to display something so we know what we're actually clicking. So the first option is to add text to your button so we can say undo and you can leave it just like that if you want, or you can add images or different things to your buttons as well. You can also change the font and colors, but you can see where you go to images. You can do icons that they have already loaded here, or you can go from a file and you can see I actually spent the time to make all of that tricks icons. So this was very helpful for this option. So that allows me to find the redo button. Click on that click open. And now we have an image representing the same button that it looks like in Vectric software. But you can also see the text is overlayed on that. So if we go back to the text, we can put the text at the bottom below the icon. Okay. Once you're happy with your setup, you're going to go down here and click Save and you'll see now you just created that button. And then on your device that you have connected with us that will automatically update. There is also a refresh button on the app to refresh it if it does not automatically update. Okay. So that's basically how to set up the touch bar at all. There's many more options in here that I'm not going to get into in this lesson, but you can go through this and play around with all these different settings. But now once you have these all set up on your touch portal, when you have the Vectric software open and you click one of these buttons, it will do whatever the keyboard shortcut is set up to do. All right. So that's the basics of the touch portal. Let's go into the stream deck settings and let's look at how to set up that one. And for the stream deck you're going to go to Elgato.com slash download and that will take you to this page here. And then down here you're going to go to select your product. In this case, we are working with the stream deck, so choose whichever one you purchased. In this case it'll be the XL and you'll see the device down here. And then also make sure you select your operating system. And in my case, it'll be Windows. And then right here you're going to click download. And just so you know, it's the same software that works with all the different sized stream decks. So once you download and install that, you're going to get a software that looks similar to this and this is very similar to the touch portal software, and this will also be blank when you start up. And then you just have to add in all your custom buttons. Now luckily for you, I already did all the hard work of setting this all up, so I'm just going to export my settings and then give that file to you. And then what you're going to do is come up here to the profile and then you're going to click edit profiles, and then down at the bottom you're going to click this little arrow and you're going to click import. And then I'm going to give you this file right here where it says metric profile, and then you're just going to click open and that will automatically import all of my settings that I'm going to show you in this video. So this is going to make it very simple for you and have you up and going in no time. Now, while we're here in these settings, it is good thing to note is you can set up different profiles so if you have two different people using this or if you want to set up a profile for different softwares, you can do that within this menu here and you can add or subtract profiles down at the bottom. So a nice thing you could do is set up your default to be the default that opens up with your stream deck. And that would be just by checking this box here.
And then the Vectric profile, you can select an application which in this case would be aspire for me, but it could be the Vcarve or Cut2d And then that means whenever you open up your Vectric software, that will automatically switch your stream deck screen to be the profile of the buttons that you need to use. So this makes it super simple to use. Okay, so let's close this down and you can see I just have some simple buttons on my default profile. So just to give you some ideas, I have a world clock that I installed because I do a lot of meetings
over different time zones, so that makes it nice and easy for me. You can set a countdown timer where you can press that button and it will automatically start counting down whatever time you sat there. So if you only want to work for 30 minutes, you can set that timer to remind you to stop and take a break. After 30 minutes. Another thing you could do is a date count donor. So this will be if you maybe you have a project deadline coming up, you can set that date and the settings here and that will remind you how many days you have left until that countdown.
So more settings I have here is a power button to turn my lights on and off so you can connect this with any smart devices or anything connected to your Wi-Fi network. You can even connect it to security cameras, any smart devices, which is really cool. You can connect it to YouTube. So I have this button here to go to my latest YouTube video, as well as keep count of subscribers and watches and videos. You can also set up application is where you press the button and open up whatever application you set. And this one here is a color picker, so I could hover over a color on my screen and press that button and it'll tell me exactly what color it is. And I can even switch it to like a hex value and see different colors to get the color value. And all this is done by looking at the options on the right hand side here and then just dragging and dropping it wherever you want. So for instance, if I want a button to open up a website, I can drag this website button, drop it there, give it a title, and then give it a URL. And then you can also add a custom icon or you can select an icon. Already preloaded here, Stream deck also has the option to create an own custom icon from their website, which is really cool, and it allows you to get very custom with your icons. All right. So once you have that set up, you just press the button on your stream deck and you'll see that it will do whatever you wanted to do. So that opened up my website there. And if you go back to the software, you can move that button anywhere you like. You can also right click copy, paste, delete or move it into a folder or move it to a multi action button. So once again, I'm not going to get too deep into how to use this because this would take me hours to go through all this, but it is very powerful on what you can do. Another thing I like is this button up here for plug ins and you can go to a plug in library and there's many more options you can choose from for different apps and different things you can do. So take a look through these. The nice thing is these are all free as well. So there's so many things you can do with this single device. You can also find icons, music and sound effects in this gallery as well. And then once you install those that will show up on the right here with your additional apps. All right. So let me quickly show you how to set up a button for Vectric Software. So you're going to go down to the system group and you're going to find the option that says Hotkey and you're going to drag and drop that anywhere you like, and then you can give it a title. So we can say move. This will be the move tool. And then down here you're going to click on this box and whatever you type on your keyboard is going to be the key that it uses. So the key for move is the letter M So that's all you type and then make sure you click out of that box so you don't type anything else there. And that's basically it. From there you can add a custom icon. Like I said, you can do from a file and you can find the icon that goes with that and open it up and you'll see that will switch on the screen there. And then I'll also update on your device. So now whenever I press that button, it's going to use the hot key, the letter M, and that will do whatever it does in Vectric software, which in this case will open up the move tool. Another thing you do is a hot key switch. So if you drag and drop that in there, that will allow you to do two buttons for one action. So for example, I use the F two key at the top here and then the F three key at the bottom.
And this is for the 2D and 3D view. So for the F two key, I would type in 2D view. And then over here you're going to click this radio button to go to the second key and you would name that 3D view.
So now when you press that button on your device, you'll see it'll switch back and forth between those two buttons. So that allows you to put two keyboard shortcuts in one single button. Another really powerful button is called the Multi Action. So if you drag and drop that in here, that's going to open up this folder and this allows you to do multiple actions with one click of a button. So you can do multiple keyboard shortcuts, you can do multiple keystrokes, you can even add other custom things in here as well. And what this basically does is allows you to create your own custom gadgets with one click of a button that operates many different things at the same time. So as you can see, you would just drag and drop anything you want to do. So if you wanted to do a hockey and just do any tool there, you can open up the move to. You can give it a name and then you can drag the hotkey and again to do another function. So I'm going to show you an example of how I did this. And you can see up here at the top, you can drop down the profile.
I can go to the metric profile, which is the one I have all set up at the bottom. You can also see you can add multiple pages just by clicking the plus sign. So on page four, actually three, I have these gadgets set up and all of these are is the multiple action or the multi action switch, which does two. And if I click on that to open it up, you can see all the options I put in here. So what I have this doing is copying, pasting an object, then opening up the move tool, then tabbing down to the move box and then I have it typing in a custom value, which in this case would be two inches. And then I have it tabbing a few times to go to the closed button and then I have it clicking enter to click close and then I have it opening the rotate tool, which is a letter R, and then I have it typing in 90 degrees and then tabbing a few times and clicking enter to close that tool. So that's what the first one does. And then the second one actually that was the second one.
Then the first one is does a similar thing there. So you can click that button multiple times
and then it will cycle through all of this with only clicking the button one time. So let's go to the Vectric software. I'll show you how that button actually works. So here we are in Vectric Software, and you can see I have just a simple rectangle drawn up here, and I'm going to use this rectangle to perform that operation that I just showed you. So all I have to do is select that rectangle. And the only thing I'm going to do is press the button one time on the stream deck. And when I press that button right now, it's going to copy that, paste it, move it over and rotate it all in a single action. And you see on the left hand side, it opened all those tools and performed everything I wanted to do, and I didn't even have to do anything outside to do is set that up in the beginning. And now I can run that on autopilot just by clicking that button. And this only scratches the surface of what you can do with this. You can do tons of things with this. And basically what you're doing is creating your own custom macro gadget, which is like the gadgets up here, except now you can do this even if you don't have the pro versions of the software.
So these gadgets are only available in the pro versions and Aspire. But if using the desktop versions, you will not have these gadgets. So this will allow you to do automations like that without needing the gadgets. So now you can see when I press that button again, it's going to take that shape, move it over, rotate it and do all the operations again, and then I can keep clicking that button on the stream deck. And every time I do that, it'll run through those operations. And you could see I'm getting consistent results every time with one click of a button, and that makes it super simple to do repetitive tasks. If that was something you needed to do. And like I said, that was just one example. There is so much more things you could do with that. I couldn't even imagine the things you can come up with. So I would strongly encourage you to get creative with that and let me know down in the comments below if you come up with anything interesting. All right. So let's go back to our Stream Deck software.
Let's exit out of here. And you can see I have all of these other buttons already set up and all the icons are set up. And I have multiple switch buttons as well to switch back and forth between similar operations. Also, I will note up here as well, like I said, you can have multiple devices connected to this. So you can see I have the stream deck two and I have the stream Deck XL connected to this and you can set up the custom profiles for each one. You can even copy and paste between devices. All right, So that's enough about setup. I'm going to take you through a test drive of this and show you exactly what it can do. So after you import the profile that I set up for you with a Vectric profile and you want to make sure you go to edit and set that to open up with your application in your default profile, you're going to go to this open button drag and drop that in here and down here it says app slash file. You're going to click the three dots and then here you're going to find your program that you want to open. In this case, for me, it is going to be a Aspire 11.5, and then you're going to click where it says Shortcut for the software and click open. That will automatically give it the title and it's going to automatically give it the icon. So now it's all set up on your stream deck to open up the software. So let's go into our stream deck and you'll see that button is now there. We can just click on that and you'll give it a second and that will open up the software. And I'm just going to open up that file I already had created. And one thing I did notice in the stream deck is if you have the stream deck software open, your buttons will not automatically switch over. So once you close the stream deck software down and make metric the active window, that will automatically open up your veteran keyboard shortcuts.
So now on your stream deck, it should look similar to this and you'll see you have multiple buttons you can switch over to and you can also add more if you want to. So most of these buttons are self-explanatory. What they do, you have the icon and the name to go with them. So these first ones will start a new project, open a project, save the project or import a vector. The save button will be handy to save your project throughout making it so you don't lose any progress. So that would be really quick and easy to click that button. And then we have undo, redo, cut, copy and paste, and then we have buttons to open up some commonly used tools.
And these are the only shortcuts available for Various software for the tools. So any other tools they don't have the keyboard shortcuts, so maybe in the future will add those. But for right now, these are all that we have available. So if you click the MOVE button, that will open up the MOVE tool. And then if you want to escape it, just click the escape button down here. And then we have all these other tools as well so you can cycle through those by clicking on them and then clicking escape to get out of them. Another handy feature is we have center in material. So if you had some sort of object and then you have that selected, if you click center material, that will automatically center in your job. And then we have the measure tool, the join tool. And then down here are some of the toggle buttons, which makes it really easy to go through your software. So you can see this button will switch to the toolbar tab and then back to the drawing tab. This button here will switch to the model tab and then back to the drawing tab. This one here will go to the layer tab and then if you want to go back to drawing, you can click this one. And then if you're working with a double sided project, you can use this button here to go to the bottom side or go to the top side, and then this button here will turn on the multi side view. So in order to see that, you need to be in the 3D view which you can switch with this button. So right there is the 3D view and you see right now we could see both sides, but if we turn that option off by clicking that button, you see now we only see one side and if you click the button again, now we see both sides. So that's what the multi side view does. And then we can cycle between 2D and 3D view. We can also cycle between horizontal split and vertical split.
And then if you want to go back to one view, you have to click the maximize button to make that bigger. And then if your screen is off centered, there's a button down here to fit into your material. So just click that and that will zoom fit to fill your screen. There also is a regular Zoom button to click on that that will change your icon and then you can draw a box around the area you want to zoom into and then you can click that button next to it again to zoom back out. Now, the one I skipped over here was the snap option. So if you click on that, that will open up your snapping options and then you can change those if needed and close that out. Now, the one we have down here is select all, click that, that will select all of your vectors. And then we also have rotate 45 degrees. So let's say we selected the star and click counterclockwise. That will rotate 45 degrees and the more times you click it, the more times it will rotate. Same thing with clockwise, you can click that one and or rotate 45 degrees clockwise and then there's an escape button to use for a variety of things, either selecting things or exiting out of tools. And then if you ever need help, there is the help menu. So click on that. That will open up your Vectric, help documentations and you'll see that switched our keys back to the default. But once we open Vectric software again, that switches us back to where we were. So that's the first page of keys.
The second page is for note editing, mirroring and grouping. So as first button here will enter you into the note edit mode and also exit you out of the note edit mode. So if you select that and then select an object, you are now in the note edit mode and then you can insert points, you can delete points or you can turn points into smooth points, you can cut the vector, you can switch lines to better your curves, you can switch lines to arcs, you can switch lines back to straight lines. You can make start points in different locations by hovering over them and clicking
the button, you can select two objects, two points on your screen, and then click the exposition that will line them up in the x direction. You can also select two points and then select the Y position that will line them up in the Y direction. There's also the horizontal mirror mode and the vertical mode. There's the besier tendency turning on and off. There's joining two nodes together and then we also have the undo and redo buttons on this page in case you make a mistake. And then we have some mirroring options. So let's exit the node. Edit I'll move this over here so we have mirror horizontal mirror, a copy horizontal mirror across the center mirror a copy across the center. And then we have the same thing for vertical. And then we also have the undo and redo to do that. And then we also have grouping options. So the first one is selecting a few objects
and then you click the group that will group them together. Then you can click on group two and group them. And then we also have different grouping options to group the layers different ways.
So then we have our last page here and these are for custom buttons Setup custom formulas & variables you can set up. So I already showed you what that gadget button does and how you can customize that. Another cool feature is you can add in text to these buttons. So I'll show you what I mean by that. And if we go to this profile, you'll see this is just a text box and you can enter custom text here. You can also check this box to automatically press the enter key after it types the message. But you'll see I can add in custom formulas here to be able to enter into text boxes and to make these you just grab the text option, drag and drop it and then just type in here the custom formula that you'd want. So let's say we wanted a shape that was half of the width and height of the job set up. So we can do x divided by two equals. That would be our X direction. So we can name this whatever you want, we can say width, and then this one
we can bring in and text box again and we'll name this height and this one will do y divided by two equals. And that just set up those two custom buttons. Now in the software here, let's delete this all out of our way. And now if we went to the draw rectangle tool
and we're going to set the anchor point at the center and down here for the width, we're going to type in R with button and that will automatically divide the width by two and then the height will type in our height button that will automatically divided by two as well. And then we can just click in the center and now we have a rectangle, exactly half the size of our overall dimensions. And you can see that was just a very simple example, but you can get very creative with that as well. And I'll show you as well for the top side, if we wanted to create a pocket and we wanted that to cut halfway through the material, I already set this button up to be Z divided by two equals. So up here in the cut depth, I would click that button and automatically get half of the Z height, and then I could just set up the top and click calculate. And now I have a path that is exactly halfway through the material just by clicking that one simple button. So as you can see, that is another option you can get very creative with just by typing custom formulas in the text box down here. Just make sure you type in the equal sign if you want it to display the value
at the end. So I hope this lesson helps you increase your productivity with Vectric Software. I know it's definitely going to help me out a lot so I can leave my hand on my mouse for most of the time and use my left hand for controlling all those keyboard shortcuts. You can even put your number pad in the stream deck as well so you no longer would have to type numbers with your right hand. You will be able to do that all from the stream deck. So hopefully you're excited about this as I am. And if you come up with anything that seems interesting that I haven't showed in this video, makes you drop it down in the comments below. I would definitely love to hear what you come up with. So that's all for this lesson. If you have any questions, just let me know.
as many as you want, and create a custom button on every single page. You can also have folders inside of buttons as well as set up different profiles for different users or different applications. And before we get started, I want to show you the three different devices I tried for this and the pros and cons to each one. I will have affiliate links to the two on the left and I will also have a link to the one on the right down below in the description. So the very first one I tried is called the Stream Deck two. So I think I actually paid around $118 for that while it was on sale. But the obvious limitation to this one is it only has 15 physical buttons. At first I thought that was going to be enough. But once I started setting it up, I realized I had to scroll through six different pages to get all the shortcut keys in there that I wanted. So that just made it really annoying when you had to get a keyboard shortcut that was on a page that was far away. So it is possible to use this, but I would highly recommend getting the larger one because it is a little bit annoying having to scroll through so many pages. One thing I do like about this is it does have a removable base, so you can either lay it flat on your desk or use the base, and the base has many different angles that you can adjust it to. So you can either go real low with it or you can raise it up higher. And this is just a simple USB connection to your computer. All right. The next device I tried was a free option. And this is an app that you can download on your computer or tablet, and it's called Touch Portal. Now, the pro to this is it's a free app that you can download on a tablet or phone.
But the con to that is for the free option. It only allows you to use eight buttons if you have more than eight buttons, but you most likely will. They do have a fee of around $14, I believe, to upgrade to the pro version. I did not try that pro version. I only tried the free version, but overall it seems to work pretty well. The only thing I don't like is you need a tablet or phone constantly next to your computer to be able to use it. And then you're also going to have to keep that device charged to be able to use it with your computer as well. So for me, that's a little bit annoying.
And I also don't like doing the touchscreen. I like the physical button because it's a little bit more reliable. But if you already have a phone or a device that you can use for this and you want to save a little bit of money, you can go with this option. And I will also note that stream deck has their own app as well. But this one, they want you to pay a monthly or annual subscription,
which I did not like at all. So the Touch portal was a little bit better because that one seemed to be a one time fee. All right. And then the last option, which is the one I like the most, is the Stream Deck XL. So this is basically the same exact thing as the stream deck two, except this one obviously has much more buttons. This one has a 32 physical buttons that you can use. And then, of course, you can also do multiple pages and all the buttons that I fit on six pages of the smaller one, I was able to fit in two pages of this one. So I like that much better. When you can just go to the second page and see all of the buttons and you only have two pages to go in between. For me, that is just much more convenient and it looks much better. The other thing I like about this one is it seems to be much higher quality than the smaller one. The base seems much more heavier dutier to your and it also conceals the cord much easier. So this one comes out the back, whereas the previous
one comes out the top, which is not a big deal, but it just looks much cleaner for this one here.
The base is not adjustable, but it does remove so you can lay it flat on your desk, which still looks very nice at the angle that it's at. Or you can mount it to the base and have it standing upright like that. For me, those two options are perfect. I don't really need anything in between those two. And at the time of making this video, this one retails around $250, but I was able to buy it on sale for $238. So for around $50 more, I would highly recommend the stream Deck XL if you can do it within your budget. If not, my second recommendation would be the stream deck two. And then finally, if you're really on a budget and you already have a device available, I would recommend the touch portal. So those are the three options. I'm sure there's many more options, but those are the only ones I've tried personally. And for this video I'm going to be mostly focusing on the stream deck XL because that one is my favorite and the one that I will be personally using. All right, so now let's look at how to set these up. First, let's quickly look at how to set up the touch portal. So to do that, you just go to your app store on your device in the search, just search for touch portal, and then just click on that to install it. And then once you install it, you can open it up. And obviously I already have this set up, but this will be a blank screen when you start up. And from here you have to connect it to your computer and that connects over Wi-Fi. And for me it hooked up automatically when I set it up on the computer.
And also all of the buttons are set up on the computer. So all you have to do on your device is install it and then go over to your computer to do the rest of the setup. So let's head over to the computer and to set up touch portal on your computer. Make sure you're using the computer that you want to control. And you first going to go to touch Dash Portal icon. I'll have that link down below in the description, but you're going to click downloads and go to Touch Portal that will take you down the page to the downloads and then just choose whatever computer you're using.
So if you're using windows, you're going to click here, download, and then just go through the process to download and install that, and that will give you this software here. So when you first open the software, it's going to have you connect to your device and it will walk you through those steps. But they have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network for that to work. And if at any time you get stuck or need extra help, they do have a hope and guide section to give you further instructions. But once you get all set up, you're going to be at the page section and this will be a blank screen when you first start. But as you can see, I already set up eight of these buttons. Now this is the free version, so I'm only allowed to do eight. It will not let me do any more than eight. To get more than eight buttons, you have to upgrade to the pro version and then you have to pay, I think, $14 for the lifetime fee. So it is fairly reasonable price. So if you want to do this option, you can. But as you can see, once you do have more available buttons, you can change how many buttons are visible on the screen. You can also change the layout from horizontal to vertical, and then you can also add and customize buttons as you wish. So let me delete one of these buttons. I'll show you how to set it up and you can actually set up one button and you can also copy and paste buttons. You can also import and export buttons. So to set up a button, you'll see you'll have a blank spot. Now that there's no button, you just click on that spot and that will open up your control to set it up. And there's many different things you can do for each of these buttons. I have not looked through all of these yet, but you can get very customize
with these buttons for a simple better keyboard shortcut. You're just going to use this option here where it says input and virtual key press. Click on that and that will ask you what button you want it to use. So you can either click on the button down here or you can actually type it on your keyboard. So in this case, I'm going to do the redo keyboard shortcut, which is control Y.
So I'll press control and Y on my keyboard and that will bring it up here and then click add.
And now you'll see when you press the key, it will press the control Y key. So now the button is all set up, but we also need it to display something so we know what we're actually clicking. So the first option is to add text to your button so we can say undo and you can leave it just like that if you want, or you can add images or different things to your buttons as well. You can also change the font and colors, but you can see where you go to images. You can do icons that they have already loaded here, or you can go from a file and you can see I actually spent the time to make all of that tricks icons. So this was very helpful for this option. So that allows me to find the redo button. Click on that click open. And now we have an image representing the same button that it looks like in Vectric software. But you can also see the text is overlayed on that. So if we go back to the text, we can put the text at the bottom below the icon. Okay. Once you're happy with your setup, you're going to go down here and click Save and you'll see now you just created that button. And then on your device that you have connected with us that will automatically update. There is also a refresh button on the app to refresh it if it does not automatically update. Okay. So that's basically how to set up the touch bar at all. There's many more options in here that I'm not going to get into in this lesson, but you can go through this and play around with all these different settings. But now once you have these all set up on your touch portal, when you have the Vectric software open and you click one of these buttons, it will do whatever the keyboard shortcut is set up to do. All right. So that's the basics of the touch portal. Let's go into the stream deck settings and let's look at how to set up that one. And for the stream deck you're going to go to Elgato.com slash download and that will take you to this page here. And then down here you're going to go to select your product. In this case, we are working with the stream deck, so choose whichever one you purchased. In this case it'll be the XL and you'll see the device down here. And then also make sure you select your operating system. And in my case, it'll be Windows. And then right here you're going to click download. And just so you know, it's the same software that works with all the different sized stream decks. So once you download and install that, you're going to get a software that looks similar to this and this is very similar to the touch portal software, and this will also be blank when you start up. And then you just have to add in all your custom buttons. Now luckily for you, I already did all the hard work of setting this all up, so I'm just going to export my settings and then give that file to you. And then what you're going to do is come up here to the profile and then you're going to click edit profiles, and then down at the bottom you're going to click this little arrow and you're going to click import. And then I'm going to give you this file right here where it says metric profile, and then you're just going to click open and that will automatically import all of my settings that I'm going to show you in this video. So this is going to make it very simple for you and have you up and going in no time. Now, while we're here in these settings, it is good thing to note is you can set up different profiles so if you have two different people using this or if you want to set up a profile for different softwares, you can do that within this menu here and you can add or subtract profiles down at the bottom. So a nice thing you could do is set up your default to be the default that opens up with your stream deck. And that would be just by checking this box here.
And then the Vectric profile, you can select an application which in this case would be aspire for me, but it could be the Vcarve or Cut2d And then that means whenever you open up your Vectric software, that will automatically switch your stream deck screen to be the profile of the buttons that you need to use. So this makes it super simple to use. Okay, so let's close this down and you can see I just have some simple buttons on my default profile. So just to give you some ideas, I have a world clock that I installed because I do a lot of meetings
over different time zones, so that makes it nice and easy for me. You can set a countdown timer where you can press that button and it will automatically start counting down whatever time you sat there. So if you only want to work for 30 minutes, you can set that timer to remind you to stop and take a break. After 30 minutes. Another thing you could do is a date count donor. So this will be if you maybe you have a project deadline coming up, you can set that date and the settings here and that will remind you how many days you have left until that countdown.
So more settings I have here is a power button to turn my lights on and off so you can connect this with any smart devices or anything connected to your Wi-Fi network. You can even connect it to security cameras, any smart devices, which is really cool. You can connect it to YouTube. So I have this button here to go to my latest YouTube video, as well as keep count of subscribers and watches and videos. You can also set up application is where you press the button and open up whatever application you set. And this one here is a color picker, so I could hover over a color on my screen and press that button and it'll tell me exactly what color it is. And I can even switch it to like a hex value and see different colors to get the color value. And all this is done by looking at the options on the right hand side here and then just dragging and dropping it wherever you want. So for instance, if I want a button to open up a website, I can drag this website button, drop it there, give it a title, and then give it a URL. And then you can also add a custom icon or you can select an icon. Already preloaded here, Stream deck also has the option to create an own custom icon from their website, which is really cool, and it allows you to get very custom with your icons. All right. So once you have that set up, you just press the button on your stream deck and you'll see that it will do whatever you wanted to do. So that opened up my website there. And if you go back to the software, you can move that button anywhere you like. You can also right click copy, paste, delete or move it into a folder or move it to a multi action button. So once again, I'm not going to get too deep into how to use this because this would take me hours to go through all this, but it is very powerful on what you can do. Another thing I like is this button up here for plug ins and you can go to a plug in library and there's many more options you can choose from for different apps and different things you can do. So take a look through these. The nice thing is these are all free as well. So there's so many things you can do with this single device. You can also find icons, music and sound effects in this gallery as well. And then once you install those that will show up on the right here with your additional apps. All right. So let me quickly show you how to set up a button for Vectric Software. So you're going to go down to the system group and you're going to find the option that says Hotkey and you're going to drag and drop that anywhere you like, and then you can give it a title. So we can say move. This will be the move tool. And then down here you're going to click on this box and whatever you type on your keyboard is going to be the key that it uses. So the key for move is the letter M So that's all you type and then make sure you click out of that box so you don't type anything else there. And that's basically it. From there you can add a custom icon. Like I said, you can do from a file and you can find the icon that goes with that and open it up and you'll see that will switch on the screen there. And then I'll also update on your device. So now whenever I press that button, it's going to use the hot key, the letter M, and that will do whatever it does in Vectric software, which in this case will open up the move tool. Another thing you do is a hot key switch. So if you drag and drop that in there, that will allow you to do two buttons for one action. So for example, I use the F two key at the top here and then the F three key at the bottom.
And this is for the 2D and 3D view. So for the F two key, I would type in 2D view. And then over here you're going to click this radio button to go to the second key and you would name that 3D view.
So now when you press that button on your device, you'll see it'll switch back and forth between those two buttons. So that allows you to put two keyboard shortcuts in one single button. Another really powerful button is called the Multi Action. So if you drag and drop that in here, that's going to open up this folder and this allows you to do multiple actions with one click of a button. So you can do multiple keyboard shortcuts, you can do multiple keystrokes, you can even add other custom things in here as well. And what this basically does is allows you to create your own custom gadgets with one click of a button that operates many different things at the same time. So as you can see, you would just drag and drop anything you want to do. So if you wanted to do a hockey and just do any tool there, you can open up the move to. You can give it a name and then you can drag the hotkey and again to do another function. So I'm going to show you an example of how I did this. And you can see up here at the top, you can drop down the profile.
I can go to the metric profile, which is the one I have all set up at the bottom. You can also see you can add multiple pages just by clicking the plus sign. So on page four, actually three, I have these gadgets set up and all of these are is the multiple action or the multi action switch, which does two. And if I click on that to open it up, you can see all the options I put in here. So what I have this doing is copying, pasting an object, then opening up the move tool, then tabbing down to the move box and then I have it typing in a custom value, which in this case would be two inches. And then I have it tabbing a few times to go to the closed button and then I have it clicking enter to click close and then I have it opening the rotate tool, which is a letter R, and then I have it typing in 90 degrees and then tabbing a few times and clicking enter to close that tool. So that's what the first one does. And then the second one actually that was the second one.
Then the first one is does a similar thing there. So you can click that button multiple times
and then it will cycle through all of this with only clicking the button one time. So let's go to the Vectric software. I'll show you how that button actually works. So here we are in Vectric Software, and you can see I have just a simple rectangle drawn up here, and I'm going to use this rectangle to perform that operation that I just showed you. So all I have to do is select that rectangle. And the only thing I'm going to do is press the button one time on the stream deck. And when I press that button right now, it's going to copy that, paste it, move it over and rotate it all in a single action. And you see on the left hand side, it opened all those tools and performed everything I wanted to do, and I didn't even have to do anything outside to do is set that up in the beginning. And now I can run that on autopilot just by clicking that button. And this only scratches the surface of what you can do with this. You can do tons of things with this. And basically what you're doing is creating your own custom macro gadget, which is like the gadgets up here, except now you can do this even if you don't have the pro versions of the software.
So these gadgets are only available in the pro versions and Aspire. But if using the desktop versions, you will not have these gadgets. So this will allow you to do automations like that without needing the gadgets. So now you can see when I press that button again, it's going to take that shape, move it over, rotate it and do all the operations again, and then I can keep clicking that button on the stream deck. And every time I do that, it'll run through those operations. And you could see I'm getting consistent results every time with one click of a button, and that makes it super simple to do repetitive tasks. If that was something you needed to do. And like I said, that was just one example. There is so much more things you could do with that. I couldn't even imagine the things you can come up with. So I would strongly encourage you to get creative with that and let me know down in the comments below if you come up with anything interesting. All right. So let's go back to our Stream Deck software.
Let's exit out of here. And you can see I have all of these other buttons already set up and all the icons are set up. And I have multiple switch buttons as well to switch back and forth between similar operations. Also, I will note up here as well, like I said, you can have multiple devices connected to this. So you can see I have the stream deck two and I have the stream Deck XL connected to this and you can set up the custom profiles for each one. You can even copy and paste between devices. All right, So that's enough about setup. I'm going to take you through a test drive of this and show you exactly what it can do. So after you import the profile that I set up for you with a Vectric profile and you want to make sure you go to edit and set that to open up with your application in your default profile, you're going to go to this open button drag and drop that in here and down here it says app slash file. You're going to click the three dots and then here you're going to find your program that you want to open. In this case, for me, it is going to be a Aspire 11.5, and then you're going to click where it says Shortcut for the software and click open. That will automatically give it the title and it's going to automatically give it the icon. So now it's all set up on your stream deck to open up the software. So let's go into our stream deck and you'll see that button is now there. We can just click on that and you'll give it a second and that will open up the software. And I'm just going to open up that file I already had created. And one thing I did notice in the stream deck is if you have the stream deck software open, your buttons will not automatically switch over. So once you close the stream deck software down and make metric the active window, that will automatically open up your veteran keyboard shortcuts.
So now on your stream deck, it should look similar to this and you'll see you have multiple buttons you can switch over to and you can also add more if you want to. So most of these buttons are self-explanatory. What they do, you have the icon and the name to go with them. So these first ones will start a new project, open a project, save the project or import a vector. The save button will be handy to save your project throughout making it so you don't lose any progress. So that would be really quick and easy to click that button. And then we have undo, redo, cut, copy and paste, and then we have buttons to open up some commonly used tools.
And these are the only shortcuts available for Various software for the tools. So any other tools they don't have the keyboard shortcuts, so maybe in the future will add those. But for right now, these are all that we have available. So if you click the MOVE button, that will open up the MOVE tool. And then if you want to escape it, just click the escape button down here. And then we have all these other tools as well so you can cycle through those by clicking on them and then clicking escape to get out of them. Another handy feature is we have center in material. So if you had some sort of object and then you have that selected, if you click center material, that will automatically center in your job. And then we have the measure tool, the join tool. And then down here are some of the toggle buttons, which makes it really easy to go through your software. So you can see this button will switch to the toolbar tab and then back to the drawing tab. This button here will switch to the model tab and then back to the drawing tab. This one here will go to the layer tab and then if you want to go back to drawing, you can click this one. And then if you're working with a double sided project, you can use this button here to go to the bottom side or go to the top side, and then this button here will turn on the multi side view. So in order to see that, you need to be in the 3D view which you can switch with this button. So right there is the 3D view and you see right now we could see both sides, but if we turn that option off by clicking that button, you see now we only see one side and if you click the button again, now we see both sides. So that's what the multi side view does. And then we can cycle between 2D and 3D view. We can also cycle between horizontal split and vertical split.
And then if you want to go back to one view, you have to click the maximize button to make that bigger. And then if your screen is off centered, there's a button down here to fit into your material. So just click that and that will zoom fit to fill your screen. There also is a regular Zoom button to click on that that will change your icon and then you can draw a box around the area you want to zoom into and then you can click that button next to it again to zoom back out. Now, the one I skipped over here was the snap option. So if you click on that, that will open up your snapping options and then you can change those if needed and close that out. Now, the one we have down here is select all, click that, that will select all of your vectors. And then we also have rotate 45 degrees. So let's say we selected the star and click counterclockwise. That will rotate 45 degrees and the more times you click it, the more times it will rotate. Same thing with clockwise, you can click that one and or rotate 45 degrees clockwise and then there's an escape button to use for a variety of things, either selecting things or exiting out of tools. And then if you ever need help, there is the help menu. So click on that. That will open up your Vectric, help documentations and you'll see that switched our keys back to the default. But once we open Vectric software again, that switches us back to where we were. So that's the first page of keys.
The second page is for note editing, mirroring and grouping. So as first button here will enter you into the note edit mode and also exit you out of the note edit mode. So if you select that and then select an object, you are now in the note edit mode and then you can insert points, you can delete points or you can turn points into smooth points, you can cut the vector, you can switch lines to better your curves, you can switch lines to arcs, you can switch lines back to straight lines. You can make start points in different locations by hovering over them and clicking
the button, you can select two objects, two points on your screen, and then click the exposition that will line them up in the x direction. You can also select two points and then select the Y position that will line them up in the Y direction. There's also the horizontal mirror mode and the vertical mode. There's the besier tendency turning on and off. There's joining two nodes together and then we also have the undo and redo buttons on this page in case you make a mistake. And then we have some mirroring options. So let's exit the node. Edit I'll move this over here so we have mirror horizontal mirror, a copy horizontal mirror across the center mirror a copy across the center. And then we have the same thing for vertical. And then we also have the undo and redo to do that. And then we also have grouping options. So the first one is selecting a few objects
and then you click the group that will group them together. Then you can click on group two and group them. And then we also have different grouping options to group the layers different ways.
So then we have our last page here and these are for custom buttons Setup custom formulas & variables you can set up. So I already showed you what that gadget button does and how you can customize that. Another cool feature is you can add in text to these buttons. So I'll show you what I mean by that. And if we go to this profile, you'll see this is just a text box and you can enter custom text here. You can also check this box to automatically press the enter key after it types the message. But you'll see I can add in custom formulas here to be able to enter into text boxes and to make these you just grab the text option, drag and drop it and then just type in here the custom formula that you'd want. So let's say we wanted a shape that was half of the width and height of the job set up. So we can do x divided by two equals. That would be our X direction. So we can name this whatever you want, we can say width, and then this one
we can bring in and text box again and we'll name this height and this one will do y divided by two equals. And that just set up those two custom buttons. Now in the software here, let's delete this all out of our way. And now if we went to the draw rectangle tool
and we're going to set the anchor point at the center and down here for the width, we're going to type in R with button and that will automatically divide the width by two and then the height will type in our height button that will automatically divided by two as well. And then we can just click in the center and now we have a rectangle, exactly half the size of our overall dimensions. And you can see that was just a very simple example, but you can get very creative with that as well. And I'll show you as well for the top side, if we wanted to create a pocket and we wanted that to cut halfway through the material, I already set this button up to be Z divided by two equals. So up here in the cut depth, I would click that button and automatically get half of the Z height, and then I could just set up the top and click calculate. And now I have a path that is exactly halfway through the material just by clicking that one simple button. So as you can see, that is another option you can get very creative with just by typing custom formulas in the text box down here. Just make sure you type in the equal sign if you want it to display the value
at the end. So I hope this lesson helps you increase your productivity with Vectric Software. I know it's definitely going to help me out a lot so I can leave my hand on my mouse for most of the time and use my left hand for controlling all those keyboard shortcuts. You can even put your number pad in the stream deck as well so you no longer would have to type numbers with your right hand. You will be able to do that all from the stream deck. So hopefully you're excited about this as I am. And if you come up with anything that seems interesting that I haven't showed in this video, makes you drop it down in the comments below. I would definitely love to hear what you come up with. So that's all for this lesson. If you have any questions, just let me know.
