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Comment by banana_giraffe | Hacker News Reader

Zoom at least has such a feature, I use it all the time.

There's some strange psychological thing getting some people to mute their side. I guess it's because some people are used to a ton of noise around them they assume others are ok with it too, but I'm probably reading way too much into things.

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>There's some strange psychological thing getting some people to mute their side.

I'm not sure whether we're at the same page here

PUSH 2 TALK is not TURN ON / TURN OFF switch where you actually mute yourself, it is that you talk while having some button being pushed down e.g MOUSE SCROLL (MOUSE3) (for me it's probably one of the most practical choices)

so in this case you're always muted unless you want to talk

Spacebar does that on Zoom :)

Mute yourself and then hit spacebar. You'll be unmuted until you release

Not sure if this is on by default, by the option for this behavior is in Preferences > Audio > Press and hold 'Space Key' to temporarily unmute

Though tbf, Zoom has to be in focus in order for that to work

But you have to have zoom "on focus"?

e.g can you write code in your fancy IDE and hit space to unmute temporarily yourself?

edit:

Ok, I now see

>Though tbf, Zoom has to be in focus in order for that to work

I guess you use tabs :)

I have a yeti nano, which has a physical mute button. It’s super useful. I only wish it could:

automatically switch the mute indicator on zoom, so others can see I’m on mute

push to talk mode would be neat instead of click to unmute and another to mute again

anybody knows if the button is hackable in some way? (osx)

If you’re on windows you can use AutoHotKey to map a key or key combination of your choice to route to the spacebar in zoom, regardless of focus. I’ve done something similar for media control for apps that don’t have global hotkeys.

Their version of push-to-talk is useless since, like you mentioned, you have to keep Zoom in focus. I don't know about you, but I never had Zoom in focus when I used it. I was always multi-tasking.

> Though tbf, Zoom has to be in focus in order for that to work.

Is it possible this is an OS limitation? It wouldn't surprise me if macOS, for instance, had privacy restrictions on apps capturing the keyboard when they're out of focus. No idea if that's the case, just wondering.

Works on Mac. I use it all the time.

Yep, that's exactly what I do in Zoom.

It's the space bar, and not global (of course), but I stay muted 100% of the time, and press and hold the space bar while I'm talking, then let got when I'm done.

> not global (of course)

That's not an "of course" thing (of course). All of the above mentioned apps (Discord etc.) support the PTT hotkeys being global. Windows and OSX support global hotkeys in apps.

I was just saying it didn't take over the spacebar globally.

The zoom app has lots of room for better features, for sure.

Note that Zoom only has this for Windows. It doesn't for their Linux client, which is unfortunate.

It does have this feature on the mac.

The Mac client has it.

I did find out the hard way that the combination of Mac's VNC server and my client on Windows send a stream of press-and-release messages when I press and hold the space bar on the remote side.

It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out what people where describing when I tried to speak.

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