Darktable Complete · Stream Deck plugin

What it does

Built for both platforms: every dial, Easy Link and the Lua bridge run on macOS and on Windows, and so does every command but four, the press-and-hold commands, which hold on Windows only. Shortcuts come from darktable's own shortcut file for each platform, so the Command key mappings are darktable's, not a translation. 135 commands on macOS and 134 on Windows: Print image is the one macOS-only row.
Six dials: exposure, perspective rotation, zoom, image navigation, history scrub, and an Omni dial you assign yourself from 29 darktable sliders, up to three per dial with a press to move between them. Contrast and white balance are two of the 29.
The Lua bridge installs itself when the plugin starts and asks for one darktable restart. With it running, Exposure, Rotation and the Omni dial print the slider's real value on the touch strip in darktable's own units and keep it in step with edits you make with the mouse, and a press on Image Navigate turns the strip into a film roll of the collection. Every Windows key and five of the six dials work without it.
Easy Link is built in on the top-left key of every profile: hold it while darktable is in front and the deck follows darktable into focus, then hands your previous profile back when you leave.
A T9 keypad types values and names into darktable from the deck, phone style: 123 mode for digits, ABC mode multi-taps letters, Enter takes the suggested word, and each tap can play a click. It types into the field you last clicked. The 15-key Stream Deck opens it from a hub key; the Stream Deck + XL and the 32-key Stream Deck XL carry it on every page beside the hub.
Six bundled profiles, one per Stream Deck model. The 15-key Stream Deck gets a colour-coded category hub with every command behind it and a key that opens the keypad, and the Stream Deck + a page with four dials and seven starter keys. The Stream Deck + XL and the 32-key Stream Deck XL put the keypad and the hub on every page with every command on its category page, and the Stream Deck + XL adds six dials. The Stream Deck Mini and the Stream Deck Neo get a culling set.
Every key can play a press sound: 33 in the box, or your own recordings from our free Sound Sampler.

What you need

darktable 5.6.1 on macOS 13 or newer or on Windows 10 or 11, and Stream Deck software 6.9 or later. Dials and the touch strip need a Stream Deck + or a Stream Deck + XL; every key works on any Stream Deck model.

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Support

Good to know

Built and tested against darktable 5.6.1 on macOS 13 or newer and on Windows 10 and 11. Requires the Stream Deck app 6.9 or later. Profiles are bundled for six decks: the 15-key Stream Deck, the Stream Deck +, the Stream Deck + XL, the 32-key Stream Deck XL, the Stream Deck Mini and the Stream Deck Neo. Dials and the touch strip need a Stream Deck + or a Stream Deck + XL; keys work on every model.
Keystrokes go to the active window, so keep darktable in front when you press a key or turn a dial. The plugin never steals focus.
Many commands act in one view only, and each key's property inspector says which. The view keys toggle the way darktable's own shortcuts do: pressing Darkroom while already in the darkroom returns you to the lighttable.
The Lua bridge installs itself when the plugin starts, into darktable's own built-in Lua engine, and needs one darktable restart to load. The Install and Remove buttons in any dial's property inspector stay as the manual override. Without the bridge the Omni dial alerts rather than pretends, and the other five dials work as before.
Updating from an earlier version? Map and Slideshow & Tethering are one category now, and keys you already placed keep working under the merged name. A profile you installed before 3.1.0.0 keeps its old pages until you remove it and let the plugin install it again, which is how a deck you already set up picks up the keypad and the 13-category hub.
Updating from 1.x? The Contrast, White Balance and Lighttable Page dials no longer exist. Contrast and white balance are two of the 29 sliders the Omni dial offers, so add an Omni dial and pick the slider. Neither bundled 1.x profile seated any of the three, so only a dial you dragged onto an encoder by hand is affected.
On Windows, four commands are press and hold, not press and fire: Full preview, Force pan and zoom, Preview while held, Preview with focus. The key stays down as long as you hold it. macOS has no hold mode in this version, so on a Mac those four keys send nothing.
Remapped your darktable shortcuts? Every key has a Capture field in the property inspector: press your combination once and that key sends exactly that from then on. It works inside Multi Actions too.
Copied the 15-key Stream Deck or Stream Deck + XL profile to rearrange it? In the copy, the category keys and Home still jump to the original bundled profile, which they find by its name, and Back does not work either. Use Stream Deck's own Switch Profile and Go to Page actions in a copy instead.
In the lighttable's full preview, turning the Zoom dial changes the thumbnail grid behind the preview, not the previewed image: darktable 5.6.1 has no step action for the preview zoom. With the bridge running, a press or tap there fits the image and a long touch shows actual pixels. Without the bridge, a press in the lighttable is read as a 3 or 1 star rating.

True of every plugin we make

Every key carries the app's own shortcut for that command, and every key is remappable. Type your combination into the key's property inspector (its settings panel in the Stream Deck app) or click Capture and press it once. Where an app leaves a command unbound, the key still reaches it by the route that app exposes.
Keystrokes go to the front window and nothing steals focus, so keep the target app in front when you press.
Every command has its own drawn key art, so the deck reads at a glance instead of listing shortcuts.

Read the full quick fixes, or see this plugin on the support hub.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] with the plugin name, your Stream Deck software version, and what you pressed versus what happened. A human answers.