Karabiner – Easy Keyboard Remapping for OS X | Hacker News Reader

Karabiner – Easy Keyboard Remapping for OS X

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Karabiner (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.

The 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?

From 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) is progressing nicely, so you could try that.

For Sierra, development is focused on 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-ke...

I 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!

Once 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?

The 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.

I'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.

I had a bike accident which prevented me from typing with my left hand for a couple weeks (dislocated shoulder, broken finger). I wish this were around at the time! I had looked into physical half-qwerty keyboards, but I couldn't afford one.

I ended up hobbling together a simple app that switched two full system key layouts while holding the spacebar, more or less mimicking the half-qwerty behavior. It was my first Mac app, and it was pretty crashy, but it kept me working for those couple weeks.

I wanted to open source it, but ceased work when I was able to type with both hands again, because I knew half-qwerty was patented and didn't want to take that risk.

Really glad there's an easier solution now!

Just had to put left arm in a brace and would like to hear results too.

This 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/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) and interchange with them seamlessly.

I've done the same: I remapped my azerty keyboard to carpalx (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization). I created a rails app to generate the private.xml file. I also created a custom special-chars mapping. The rails app is here: https://github.com/pinouchon/keybest.

I use this everyday on both my work and personal macbooks.

With 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.

For most apps, can't you just keep the config files on e.g. dropbox?

I 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.

I don't know, it seems like you've implemented some kind of macOS-wide Spacemacs :)

Nice guide, was planning to do something like that myself.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner/issues/660

You should probably consider reading this if you are on 10.12 or planning to upgrade

Karabiner-Elements works perfectly for me on 10.12 (I only use it to remap caps-lock to escape).

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

Karabiner-Elements is very unfinished/unpolished though. Like, way pre-Alpha.

It's great that Karabiner is being developed, but given the number of people that are surely using MS keyboards, the situation is rather untenable. The built in key re-mapping using system preferences, at least for my mechanical keyboard, simply doesn't work. This meant that when I upgraded to Sierra, I was left with no way to remap my keyboard.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you use an external keyboard, consider waiting on the upgrade to Sierra.

That's exactly what I use it for and just set it up yesterday. The instructions on the home page are fairly abysmal though.

Ditto 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" } } ] }

Try these instead :) 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...

I do a similar thing: Caps Lock mapped to Control on hold and also Escape on tap.

How did you manage to do that with Karabiner Elements?

Yeah, that's why I've provided the link :) Alternatives!

Seconding this. I'm now unable to use CAPS LOCK on my Mac as ESC, which makes using vim slightly more of a pain.

I upgraded to the Sierra beta yesterday and the i and h keys were reversed on my external mechanical keyboards. Seemed a bit strange.

Upgraded to the Sierra beta?

Why? The real thing has been out since September 20.

10.12.1 beta is already out

Happened to me too: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/64304

I downgraded to el cap solely because karabiner stopped working in sierra.

My 'a' key didn't work either. I filed a radar yesterday.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... > Set Caps Lock Key to Escape

I 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.

Apparently the latest beta (10.12.1) has support for this natively.

https://github.com/tekezo/Seil/issues/68#issuecomment-250195...

Interesting. 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.

Oh, 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.

Yeah, sorry I didn't specify. I am running the latest macOS Sierra beta.

And 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).

OS X nor macOS have the option to set caps lock to escape. This is why people who want to do this use Seil or Karabiner Elements.

I map escape to jj which is pretty useful. Thanks to some article somewhere years ago fir that.

Since upgrading to Sierra broke my Karabiner, I started using 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.

Anyone 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)

Karabiner 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.

Remapping 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" } } ] }

Interesting. 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.

Remapping 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/#cont...

For X11, there's xcape: https://github.com/alols/xcape

For Windows, of course, AutoHotKey (my config: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/master/windows/ke...)

Karabiner 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-cultu...

This 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.

Support for Sierra: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

Note that at the time of writing, it can't do multi-key remaps, which might be a deal breaker for you.

Check out Brett Terpstra's post on hacking the hyper key on 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!

Absolutely 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!

I 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!

karabiner 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

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.

All 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.

FWIW, 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.

  > 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 or just copy and edit a .keylayout file.

Honestly, 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.

I 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/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.

Karabiner 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."

Elements 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.

Would 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.

Having 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).

It'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.

System 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")

Doing that, plus swapping Cmd + Opt in System Preferences, is all I need to use a standard PC keyboard on a Mac. Works great.

Detection doesn't help if the OS doesn't include the layout at all. :/

I 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... .

From [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/

I 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)

> "click to drag"

Why not 3 finger drag (they moved it to Accessibility in El Capitan)?

Nice 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.

What about `DefaultKeyBinding.dict`?

It doesn't need a kernel extension. http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html

Wow, 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!

I 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!

I 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?

You have options "Don't apply mappings to internal laptop keyboard" and "Don't apply mappings to Apple keyboards". Will that do?

Yes, that did the job. Thank you!

I use Karabiner daily at work; the ergonomic keyboard I really like doesn't have Mac drivers, and Karabiner fixes all of the "wrong" keys.

An incredibly useful tool with an astonishingly bad UI.

Somewhat related, if you have ever wanted to use emacs (or readline) style keybindings on macOS check out 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.

I'm able to keep about 15 years of muscle memory for Windows shortcuts because of this excellent program. So glad it exists.

Yes, I used a corsair K70 mechanical keyboard and Karabiner helps me to remap Alt and Command key. It is super useful.

Since 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

I'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.

(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.

I 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.

My 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.

I've been using karabiner and seil for a long time. Both are great.

I use it with my marble mouse logitech to emulate scrolling... love it

Have 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

I 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.

What version of osx are you using?

Great tool. I remap Right-Option to Right-Control. :)

I use karabiner to fix a chattering spacebar on a way to expensive keyboard to have a chattering spacebar.

Works great! saved my day.

I've also had great success with this to have different scroll direction for trackpad and mouse wheel.

How do I disable the left shift key on karibiner elementes?

I hate Windows now because of this thing.

been using it for 1 year to swap keys (beer+keyboard accident...) and it works well

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