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Karabiner – Easy Keyboard Remapping for OS X
- rotskoff 10y agoI have been using Karabiner for about a year now to disable my option key, which was permanently depressed due to water damage. I haven't exploited it for my productivity, but it saved me a good deal of money!
- konart 10y agohttps://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner/issues/660 https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner/issues/660 You should probably consider reading this if you are on 10.12 or planning to upgrade
- dopu 10y agoSeconding this. I'm now unable to use CAPS LOCK on my Mac as ESC, which makes using vim slightly more of a pain.
- melling 10y agoI upgraded to the Sierra beta yesterday and the i and h keys were reversed on my external mechanical keyboards. Seemed a bit strange.
- evanrelf 10y agoSystem Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... > Set Caps Lock Key to Escape
- apetresc 10y agoI don't believe 'Escape' is one of the options. On macOS Sierra, as for every previous version for me, the only choices to remap through the prefPane are "Caps Lock", "Control", "Option", and "Command". Hence why Seil/KarabinerElements is the first thing I install on a new Mac.
- robgough 10y agoApparently the latest beta (10.12.1) has support for this natively. https://github.com/tekezo/Seil/issues/68#issuecomment-250195039 https://github.com/tekezo/Seil/issues/68#issuecomment-250195...
- apetresc 10y agoOh, well then! Looking forward to the first Sierra update, in that case :) I really did not expect Apple to finally fill this gap that has been around for so many years.
- evanrelf 10y agoYeah, sorry I didn't specify. I am running the latest macOS Sierra beta.
- jaimebuelta 10y agoInteresting. It really has, but I didn't see it before. I was using Karabiner to set caps lock to control AND escape when pressed independently, something extremely useful to use Vim and command line. This doesn't appear to be supported, unfortunately.
- quinndupont 10y agoAnd at least for me, the system preference switches simply don't work for my external keyboard (it can't seem to fully understand the difference between an internal keyboard and an external keyboard).
- codyb 10y agoI map escape to jj which is pretty useful. Thanks to some article somewhere years ago fir that.
- xwvvvvwx 10y agoKarabiner-Elements works perfectly for me on 10.12 (I only use it to remap caps-lock to escape). https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements
- statictype 10y agoThat's exactly what I use it for and just set it up yesterday. The instructions on the home page are fairly abysmal though.
- rgoodwintx 10y agoDitto to the readme on GH. The key (ahem) bits: 1. Create ~/.karabiner.d/configuration/karabiner.json 2. Put some stuff in it (my simple example below) 3. Install the app from the GH page. Key definitions are in the source code, but if you check the Issues discussion on the Elements project, you'll probably find good examples to send you on your way. Sample karabiner.json: { "profiles": [ { "name": "Default profile", "selected": true, "simple_modifications": { "right_option": "delete_forward" } } ] }
- geerlingguy 10y agoTry these instead :) http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/remapping-caps-lock-key-escape-macos-sierra http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/remapping-caps-lock-ke... The next Sierra release might allow the Esc key to be remapped natively, through the Keyboard System Preferences...
- jagger27 10y agoI do a similar thing: Caps Lock mapped to Control on hold and also Escape on tap.
- rathrio 10y agoHow did you manage to do that with Karabiner Elements?
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- achikin 10y agoI usually swap Alt and Command keys on my external Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. Is there a way to distinct between keyboards in Karabiner as you can do in standard keyboard preferences?
- neurocroc 10y agoThis application has been really huge for my productivity. I have literally rebinded every single key on my mac with it. It is very powerful especially when you combine it with the multitude of Alfred workflows and different scripts that you can run. I open Alfred with just single press of right command, I switch between all my apps through hotkeys, my caps lock is a hyper key, my right shift is delete. Can't give more praise to this tool really. Here is how I use it and what my config file for it looks like for all interested : https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/tree/master/karabiner https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/tree/master/karab... More importantly, it allows to keep myself sane with the enormous amounts of apps and tools I run on my system (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os) and interchange with them seamlessly.
- fspacef 10y agoNice guide, was planning to do something like that myself.
- Singletoned 10y agoWith all that software, I don't suppose you've come up with a good solution for installing and configuring it all automatically on a new machine? Last time I tried to automate it I used homebrew cask, but it definitely wasn't a satisfying solution.
- wingerlang 10y agoFor most apps, can't you just keep the config files on e.g. dropbox?
- p10_user 10y agoI like using github and stow. I use stow to easily symlink from my cloned copy ofy config files to the proper directory. It's simple and easy to set up.
- mrkgnao 10y agoI don't know, it seems like you've implemented some kind of macOS-wide Spacemacs :)
- meta_AU 10y agoWould go crazy without this. My work Mac has fn as the far left key, now I have it mapped to Ctrl for most combinations but it is clever enough to know that fn + down is pgdown.
- vikiomega9 10y agoSupport for Sierra: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements
- rys 10y agoNote that at the time of writing, it can't do multi-key remaps, which might be a deal breaker for you.
- lodestone 10y agoCheck out Brett Terpstra's post on hacking the hyper key on Sierra: http://brettterpstra.com/2016/09/29/a-better-hyper-key-hack-for-sierra/ http://brettterpstra.com/2016/09/29/a-better-hyper-key-hack-... I'm happy with the fix for now. In fact, I've learned how awesome Hammerspoon is!
- 1057x31337 10y agoI've been using karabiner and seil for a long time. Both are great.
- xrjn 10y agoKarabiner is quite cool but there were a few gotchas that were non intuitive for me. I wrote a getting started guide[0] a few months ago that starts right from the beginning. [0] https://medium.com/@.sasha/hacking-apple-s-consumerist-culture-6af79604f495 https://medium.com/@.sasha/hacking-apple-s-consumerist-cultu...
- grantcox 10y agoThis was very helpful for me, thank you. I couldn't get Karabiner to work - it seemed to install correctly, but none of the "prepared settings" did anything. No matter what options I'd chosen, my keyboard (both laptop keyboard and external) were unaffected. Reading over your guide I decided to just try your "swap space and tab" example in the private.xml file, and lo-and-behold, that worked. As does recreating the inbuilt "play/pause, mute and volume to F9-F12" in private.xml, whereas the inbuilt version doesn't work for me.
- webwielder2 10y agoAn incredibly useful tool with an astonishingly bad UI.
- peascouih 10y agoI use it with my marble mouse logitech to emulate scrolling... love it
- ensmotko 10y agoRemapping the caps lock key to the delete key (delete the character in front of the cursor) has been a great productivity boost for me. Below is the karabiner.json file that I'm using for this: { "profiles": [ { "name": "Default profile", "selected": true, "simple_modifications": { "caps_lock": "delete_forward" } } ] }
- copperx 10y agoInteresting. Remapping it to Control is the greatest help for me because most Mac programs support basic Emacs keybindings. Using Ctrl a or e to go to the end of line is much easier than pressing Fn.
- floatboth 10y agoRemapping it to Control is easy to do natively in macOS. What you can do with Karabiner is Control/Escape: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#controlescape http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#cont... For X11, there's xcape: https://github.com/alols/xcape https://github.com/alols/xcape For Windows, of course, AutoHotKey (my config: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/master/windows/keyboardstuff.ahk https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/master/windows/ke...)
- izacus 10y agoIt's a great piece of software. I maintain a few Macs for my family and they don't use Apple keyboards for various reasons. Since Apple refuses to add support for standard PC layouts (and creates monstrosities like localized keyboard layout which has @ key on shift + alt + 2 which causes no end of support requests), having Karabiner remap it to the standard PC keyboard layout matching the hardware is a huge boon.
- Someone 10y agoSystem Preferences => Change Keyboard Type… gives an UI that directs you to press a few keys that help detect your keyboard layout. That has worked fine for me (N=1) when adding a Dell keyboard to a Mac Mini. I think that UI was added for the Mac Mini, as it was the first Mac sold without keyboard ("bring your own keyboard and mouse")
- ajmurmann 10y agoI've also had great success with this to have different scroll direction for trackpad and mouse wheel.
- matheweis 10y agoI use Karabiner daily at work; the ergonomic keyboard I really like doesn't have Mac drivers, and Karabiner fixes all of the "wrong" keys.
- lars512 10y agoI used Karabiner for a month after getting hit by a car and breaking my right wrist. I couldn't use that hand at all whilst it healed. I had Karabiner remap my keyboard to half-qwerty, so that I could type entirely using my left hand on the left side of the keyboard only. A modifier key would switch it into "mirror mode" so that all the left-side keys would be remapped to right-side keys. Fun stuff!
- milesokeefe 10y agoOnce you regained use of your right hand did it take any time to get back to full typing speed using both hands? How close to your two hand WPM did you achieve with your left hand alone?
- lj3 10y agoI'm adding my comment here to "pile on" and say that I'm very interested in the answers to these questions, too. I tried to learn a one handed keyboard back in college (Matias Half Keyboard) just to see if there was any benefit to always having one hand on the kb and one on the mouse. I never did find out; I gave up learning how to type with one hand after a month and sent the keyboard back.
- lars512 10y agoThe biggest obstacle was the swelling in the wrist after surgery. I had to keep it elevated for quite a long time, and it would throb and be painful when I lowered it to the keyboard. That passed gradually over 2 months. The finger dexterity never left, the moments I held my hand there I could type at ~80% speed without problems from early on. With just my left hand, I could only manage more like 20%, which felt very very slow to me. The bottleneck with half-querty was the modifier key, which I had to hit very often to switch layouts. If you could move that to something else, that layout could speed up much more. Had I been out of action much longer, I might have tried some kind of custom one-handed chording setup instead.
- tomcam 10y agoJust had to put left arm in a brace and would like to hear results too.
- Stratoscope 10y agoKarabiner is great. After XtraFinder stoped working because I upgraded to El Capitan and didn't want to disable SIP, I tried Karabiner to see if it had the one feature from XtraFinder that was essential for me: changing the crazy Finder key mappings of Enter to rename a file/directory and ⌘O to open it. I like having Enter open a file or directory and F2 rename it, and not just because I'm used to Windows. I open things a lot more than I rename them. Enter is the canonical key for opening something, and does just that in OSX file dialogs. It makes no sense that Enter does one thing in file dialogs but something completely different in Finder. Sure enough, right there in Karabiner's built-in settings were options to remap those keys.
- kefka_p 10y agoHave been using Karabiner for years. Works great if you have an "I set my drink too close to my keyboard" moment and need to make a spare PC keyboard work with your Mac to meet your deadlines. =D
- chris_wot 10y agoI keep trying to get Karabiner to load but something is stopping it. Wish I could tell, I've needed it in the past to remap keys to get around VirtualBox quirks.
- fspacef 10y agoWhat version of osx are you using?
- transfire 10y agoHonestly, someone needs to go back and rethink the way keyboard input is handled in Unixes. There are a lot of neat ideas out there that just can't be done without a programmable keyboard controller.
- rbalicki 10y agoAbsolutely love this tool (and Seil, and BetterTouchTool). I shift-reversed the number keys (i.e. shift-6 prints a 6, the 6 by itself prints ^), made my left and right shift's open and close parentheses (I tried to make alt+left-shift a square bracket, but couldn't get that working very well), made caps lock escape or control and shift-reversed the backslash/pipe key. I have trouble using other people's keyboards now but I'm very productive on my own!
- mrkgnao 10y agoI have a pretty wacky config (xorg for me), but I'd never thought about shift-reversing. This is brilliant; I'm grateful for the tip!
- psyc 10y agoAll I hear about lately is how great this app is. I have two use cases that are pretty important to me, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to make them work. I want to remap an ordinary letter key to another ordinary letter key. This app loves special keys to death, but I can't figure out how to do anything with boring keys. I also want to disable the built-in keyboard while I'm using a bluetooth keyboard. Apparently you could maybe do this before Sierra, but not with the Sierra prototype? I don't know. This is the kind of byzantine app where it's next to impossible to know whether you're missing something among its piles of features.
- guptaneil 10y agoFWIW, the Sierra prototype is missing 95% of the features of the full pre-Sierra app. It's merely a proof of concept of the architecture rewrite needed to support Sierra.
- kps 10y ago> I want to remap an ordinary letter key to another ordinary letter key. Regular keys should probably be mapped with a regular keyboard layout, unless 10.12 screwed that up too. See Ukelele (sic) http://www.sil.org/resources/software_fonts/ukelele http://www.sil.org/resources/software_fonts/ukelele or just copy and edit a .keylayout file.
- nicolasMLV 10y agobeen using it for 1 year to swap keys (beer+keyboard accident...) and it works well
- greyhat 10y agoI'm able to keep about 15 years of muscle memory for Windows shortcuts because of this excellent program. So glad it exists.
- thought_alarm 10y agoI've been using Karabiner for years to map the volume and media keys to a 1987 vintage Apple Extended Keyboard. Incidentally, remapping Caps Lock to Control on that keyboard required a soldering iron and a pair of side cutters. But it works.
- richdougherty 10y agoGreat tool. I remap Right-Option to Right-Control. :)
- shpx 10y agoSomewhat related, if you have ever wanted to use emacs (or readline) style keybindings on macOS check out https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/9670905 https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/9670905 Most of the keybindings don't seem to work on El Capitan, but just having a system wide alt-b and alt-f is very nice.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kardashian007 10y agoKarabiner doesn't work at all with Sierra. There's some "new" project called Karabiner Elements is supposedly half-finished, but yet people keep donating hoping they'll get something usable soon. Not holding my breath and it would be completely new and will likely lack useful features of the abandoned one. It would be more useful to more people to temporarily fix Karabiner and work on Elements later, but no, gotta ignore paying users and stick to "the plan."
- rgoodwintx 10y agoElements is a bridge while the main project is rewritten. (It's in the name..."elements" of the original project.) They stated in several places that it can't be "temporarily" fixed due to major structural changes to (I believe) the keyboard driver in Sierra. Also pretty sure that Karabiner has been free forever. (Donations accepted, but you know how rarely that happens.) Just keeping the record straight, as someone who loves the app and, yes was temporarily inconvenienced, but bravo to them for rapidly putting out something to tide users over.
- STRiDEX 10y agoI use karabiner to fix a chattering spacebar on a way to expensive keyboard to have a chattering spacebar. Works great! saved my day.
- aladine 10y agoYes, I used a corsair K70 mechanical keyboard and Karabiner helps me to remap Alt and Command key. It is super useful.
- kozikow 10y agoI am using keyboard layout striving for good ratio between performance improvement and switching costs implemented using karabiner: https://kozikow.com/2013/11/15/the-only-alternative-keyboard-layout-youll-ever-need-as-a-programmer/ https://kozikow.com/2013/11/15/the-only-alternative-keyboard... .
- seagoj 10y agoI use karabiner to turn off the internal keyboard when I connect an external keyboard. It let's me put a tenkeyless Thinkpad keyboard right over the MacBook keyboard. The only exception is that the power key still functions.
- nkurz 10y agoI just looked at my Karabiner preferences on my Macbook, and it contains three entries: 1) fn + cursor key to Page Up/Page Down/Home/End. Occasionally nice, but usually not necessary. 2) Option-R to right click Slightly nicer than Ctrl-click, but not essential. 3) Caps Lock to left click Absolutely essential and I can hardly live without it. Tap to click is fine on the touchpad, but "click to drag" was something I hated until I did this mapping. If you haven't already mapped Caps Lock to something else you can't live without, I would highly recommend trying this. You'll probably need Karabiner's partner program Seil to do it: (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html.en https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html.en)
- laktak 10y ago> "click to drag" Why not 3 finger drag (they moved it to Accessibility in El Capitan)?
- nkurz 10y agoNice to know. I've had that on before, but because the "picture" shows moving a window, I hadn't known that it worked for all dragging options, including those with modifiers (like copying a file). I just tested, and it does. But I find the "left pinky" on Caps Lock to be more convenient than repositioning my right hand to do a 3-finger drag. And I use it for other clicks besides drags --- that was just one case I liked. What I'd really like for 3-finger drag is the ability to move windows without having to click in the title-bar. That is, 3-finger drag anywhere within the window to reposition. Do you know if there is any way to enable this? Currently I use Better Touch Tool (another excellent configuration program) for Cmd-Option-Click-drag to reposition, but this sometimes interferes with certain applications.
- mherdeg 10y agoI use this tool because I like to run the binary distribution of nethack from the command line inside an OS X Terminal window, and I am VERY accustomed to using the up/down/left/right arrow keys to move around (from how things used to work when I ran Windows). It seemed really hard to send that binary "hjkl" instead of up/down/left/rgiht arrow key signals any other way and it also seemed hard to compile in the desired behavior by hand (although, hmm). I'm lazy, so I ended up just running Karabiner with this tiny private.xml: https://gist.github.com/mherdeg/4eca69637d176bc81ea19207b91135cd https://gist.github.com/mherdeg/4eca69637d176bc81ea19207b911... I found that I context-switched between places where I wanted the arrow key to send hjkl (Terminal.app running the binary) and places where I did not (everywhere else). To make things slightly easier, I set up a "profile" in Terminal.app called "nethack" which uses xterm-16color, displays ANSI colors in a readable way, sets the window title to "Nethack", and launches /usr/local/bin/nethack when this profile is opened. The Karabiner private.xml setting that can be toggled on/off here ends up pretty much only rewriting arrow keys when I want them to. This seems like kind of a crazy workaround but it was really easy to deploy.
- torspo 10y agoSince upgrading to Sierra broke my Karabiner, I started using Ukelele. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=... I tried Karabiner Elements but couldn't figure out how to replicate my configuration.
- quinndupont 10y agoAnyone have any comments on limitations/issues with Ukelele? I'm stranded with Karabiner-Elements being so rough, and I'd like to switch to something simpler (I just need to remap option and command keys for my external keyboard)
- JohnGB 10y agoKarabiner (and its predecessor) is invaluable for me every day use of my macbook. In general using a touchpad feels like trying to type with only one finger, but with the "multi-touch exension" (I think it's based on touchsense), allows me to redefine my keyboard depending on what's happening on my touchpad. So, now my left hand is always on the home keys, and if I'm touching the touchpad with one finger, the home keys are my left, right, and middle mouse buttons. If I'm touching it with two fingers, the home keys and nearby keys remap to save, refresh, find, select all, copy, paste, cut, close, and others. If three fingers are touching, then my keys remap to my windows layout and other utility programs which I often call (such as the terminal). There are many other general remappings which have made my life at a keyboard much faster and easier to use, but the multi-touch extensions are the ones that I would struggle to live without. As a side note, if you use the product and find it helpful, you should really consider donating to it. It will make you feel like a better human, and encourage continued support.
- lucidstack 10y agoThe multi-touch extension sounds amazing. I went to try it, but it doesn't seem to work. I see the little dialog in the bottom right corner when I have my fingers on the trackpad, but nothing happens on keystroke. It's mostly definitely due to the recent update to Sierra. If you do use Sierra, have you managed to make it work?
- geerlingguy 10y agoFor Sierra, development is focused on Karabiner Elements: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements I had to get my Esc key remapped to Caps Lock, and that's the only way I could do it for now. See: http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/remapping-caps-lock-key-escape-macos-sierra http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/remapping-caps-lock-ke...
- JohnGB 10y agoFrom El Capitan Apple have been "courageous" enough to essentially disable many of the most useful apps with some of their new "features". I still use El Capitan, so I have yet to deal with the Sierra issues, however I have heard that Karabiner-Elements (https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements) is progressing nicely, so you could try that.
- igauravsehrawat 10y agoMy two keys stopped working. I used Karabiner to switch my keys to two music keys. Saved me. I was surprised it was available for free, felt guilty and donated some money for awesome software.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoFrom [0]: > Do not change the location of Karabiner.app from /Applications. > For example, Karabiner will not work properly if you moved Karabiner.app into /Applications/Utils. I'm curious: why is this? [0] https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
- salzig 10y agoWhat about `DefaultKeyBinding.dict`? It doesn't need a kernel extension. http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html
- yoda_sl 10y agoWow, I have been using OS X for years, but never heard about that tip! Ok it is limited to Cocoa apps but still a great thing to know!
- rado 10y ago(Un)related note, any chance of fixing language input switching to respect each app's setting and default setting for new apps? It's been broken since 10.4 and this fan's only serious problem with macOS.
- dm03514 10y agokarabiner is absolutely critical to support external input devices, such as footswitches. OSX does not allow usb devices to modify input from other devices: Note: Modifier actions from one USB device cannot modify the input of a second USB device due to limitations designed into the Apple operating system. Example: Shift, Control, Command, or Option keystrokes programmed into the footswitch cannot modify the input of a separate USB keyboard or mouse. However, a key sequence like ‘Cmd-W’ or ‘Cmd-Shift-left arrow’ will work on a Macintosh if the entire sequence of keystrokes has been pre-programmed into the footswitch. (Footswitch can only be programmed on a Windows PC). http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/140732/8592 http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/140732/8592 While Karabiner supports this: Share state of modifier keys with all connected keyboards: When you are using multiple keyboards, modifier keys are shared with all keyboards. For example, pressing "shift key on keyboard1" and "space key on keyboard2" sends shift-space.
- laktak 10y agoSince Karabiner doesn't work on Sierra ATM I tried to find a replacement. Looked at BTT & Keyboard Maestro but apparently this is the only one that will let you assign different actions to the right/left option and command keys. E.g. RightCmd+Up = Home but LeftCmd+Up = Cmd+Up
- iLemming 10y agoI hate Windows now because of this thing.
- afonsoabrantes 10y agoHow do I disable the left shift key on karibiner elementes?
- ZhangBanger 10y agoHaving lots of issues with Karabiner Elements on Sierra. Are all the mapping options available? I looked into the source and I see no way to replicate my Karabiner mapping - no mouse key mapping, function keys no longer work as F1-F12 keys, no 'eject' key (a shortcut for locking your screen, since OSX doesn't handle this well by default).