The Stream Deck is a powerful controller for your computer — here’s how we use it - The Verge

Elgato made the Stream Deck for streamers and gamers, but it can also be a tool for getting more done, managing all your meetings, and keeping the lights on. Here are some key tips for making the most of yours.

I initially bought a Stream Deck for one purpose: to control the lights in my home office. There’s just one light switch in there, and that switch controls the light… and also every outlet in the room. Lights off, everything off. So that switch now has a piece of tape on it, and I bought a smart bulb and a Stream Deck so I could still control the lamp in the corner.

The Stream Deck isn’t a smart home controller device, at least not the way its creators at Elgato originally conceived it. (It’s also not a Steam Deck, the game console from Valve.) They built and marketed the $150 device toward streamers (hence the name) who need to be constantly switching scenes and camera inputs, moderating a fast-moving chat, and grabbing clips to use for later, all without losing focus on the game at hand. The Stream Deck’s 15 buttons — or the six on the Stream Deck Mini or the whopping 32 on the Stream Deck XL — turned a bunch of menus and touch targets into big, mashable buttons. You develop a kind of muscle memory with the Stream Deck, and many streamers can now run their whole stream without ever even looking down. Plus, each button has a tiny display behind it, too, so if you do look, there’s even more to see.

I’m not a streamer, though, and neither are most of the folks we talked to for this episode of The Vergecast. Instead, we all found the Stream Deck because, it turns out, a bunch of programmable buttons is a pretty powerful idea. Den Delimarsky, a programmer who reverse-engineered his Stream Deck so he could build even more powerful software, called the Stream Deck “basically just a keyboard with custom buttons, right? You can make it do whatever you want just by having the buttons.”

Say you like to play super-complicated games, the kind that require complex item management or remembering the location and combinations for a hundred different buttons. You could map some or all of that work to a few Stream Deck buttons like Robert Van Der Pas did to get hundreds of buttons and knobs working with Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. Through his FlightDeck plugin, players can control more than 30 entire planes right from their Stream Deck. (Pro tip: get the big one in that case.) The Verge’s Alice Newcome-Beill uses hers similarly while playing Destiny to quickly swap between characters and load-outs without burrowing into the game’s many menus.

Fans of Microsoft Flight Simulator have turned the Stream Deck into a super-powerful tool.

    Photo: FlightDeck
  

If you’d rather spend your time tending to your super-aesthetic Notion setup, you could do what a YouTuber named Simon, who runs a channel called Better Creating, does: set up a bunch of Stream Deck buttons to make Notion pages easier to build and manage. Rather than typing slash commands and remembering names, you just whack “To Do List” and “Table” and “Divider” and “Emoji,” and you’ve created a nice-looking page. And because every Notion page is just a URL, and you can use the Stream Deck’s software to get a button to open any webpage, you can turn your Stream Deck into an index of all your most important stuff.

https://www.theverge.com/23319758/stream-deck-tips-tricks-podcast

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