#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS HOW TO#
#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS INSTALL#
#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS FULL#

#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS HOW TO#

This article is about how to take this idea of a hyper key and apply it to every key on your keyboard using Karabiner and a special DSL named Goku that makes editing your Karabiner configuration a breeze. With that article, the notion of a hyper (dual purpose) key was born but most people seemed to have stopped there. That is you could remap caps lock to act as escape key when pressed alone and some four/five key modifier when held together. I found out about the power of Karabiner by reading an old article on how you could remap caps lock key into a key that’s actually useful.

If you did, please consider sharing this on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.Karabiner is a low level macOS kernel extension that gives you a virtual keyboard you can heavily customize to your own liking.

#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS FULL#

If you would like to go beyond the examples that I've shown here, you can check out my full configuration, take a look at some of the configurations of others, or dive into the Hammerspoon documentation. Functionality can be added to this Hyper key in multiple ways by binding existing shortcuts to it, by executing Applescript code, and by using built in Hammerspoon functions.Įxamples are included for each of tese methods to get you started on your own configuration. We can set up a Hyper key by going through several steps using Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon. Win:setFullscreen(not win:isFullscreen()) Open up Karabiner Elements and add the following rule to Simple Modifications:Īlternatively, you can add the following to the 'simple modifications' section in your ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner/karabiner.json file, which can help if you want to add the configuration to your dotfiles. Remapping CAPS LOCK with Karabiner Elements

#KARABINER VS KARABINER ELEMENTS INSTALL#

Prerequisitesįirst download Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon from their pages or by using Homebrew: brew cask install hammerspoonġ. In our approach we will also be using Karabiner Elements for the initial key remapping, but we will be extending this functionality using Hammerspoon. If you don't, a simpler approach using only Karabiner Elements might be better. This is why I recommend the Hammerspoon approach if you have programming or technical experience. However, Hammerspoon gives you a lot of power in terms of automation and customisation tools.

Let me start by saying that there are multiple ways to set up a Hyper key, and our Hammerspoon approach is not the most simple one. In this guide we will be rebinding the CAPS LOCK key, since this is one of the least used and most redundant keys on the keyboard. The best solution to this is using a key that has relatively little use in day to day life, and rebind this as a Hyper key. By setting up such a key, we make sure that we can always count on our global shortcuts to work, no matter what application we're using.īut how do we do this? All keys on the keyboard have their use, and we can't really add any new ones. The Hyper KeyĪ Hyper key is a special key that is reserved only for these global shortcuts, to keep it completely separate from our regular environment and applications. To overcome these issues, we will be setting up a so-called Hyper key, a special key reserved only for global shortcuts. However, the reason that most applications don't do this is because it is highly impractical to press ⌥⌃⌘⇧ at the same time. One way to do this is using all modifier keys for these shortcuts, since most applications don't use all modifier keys at once. In order to make sure that we can always access this functionality we need to bind it to global shortcuts, of which we know that they are not used by other applications. For some tasks this can be acceptable, but there is definitely some functionality that needs to work in all contexts, like resizing windows, opening certain applications, or locking your screen. Every application has their own shortcuts, making it very likely that some of them overlap. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Wait, why did I move to the next tab in my editor?' 'I will just move my active window to the right, using ⌥⌘→.

Karabiner vs karabiner elements