undefined | Better HN

0 pointsJadeNB4y ago0 comments

Man, Mac's keyboard shortcuts for special characters irritate me so much.

First, they're there, and it's absolutely wonderful! I use far more semantically accurate Unicode rather than lossy ASCII approximations than I did back in my old Windows days. (If you don't know the special characters you can get, turn on Keyboard Viewer and whack your keyboard, especially modifier keys, a bit.)

But … I can't customise them. Even back in the days when macOS was OS X and believed in user customisation, these specific shortcuts were frozen and un-customizable. (Like the folder shortcuts in Finder. Maybe it makes sense to you for CMD-SHIFT-D to open the Downloads folder, not the Desktop. Too bad!)

(Boy, I hope I'm wrong and someone will come along and explain my stupidity to me.)

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

lelandfe4y ago· 1 in thread

> these specific shortcuts were frozen and un-customizable

I think Karabiner should allow you to do this: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

It's a utility that "remaps" keys – you set up key/key combinations that fire the original key/key combinations (it does not remove the original combination). E.g. you could bind Cmd-Q to Caps Lock if you wanted a really fast way to quit stuff.

JadeNBOP4y ago

The memory of what happened with kext's always makes me leery of relying on anything that reaches too deeply into macOS's guts, so I've always shied away from Karabiner, probably unreasonably.

Old-style OS X believed in customisation—even now, you can set per-app keyboard shortcuts; it doesn't seem possible to bind Cmd-Q to Caps Lock, but, after slipping from Cmd-W to Cmd-Q and so quitting rather than closing a tab one too many times, I do have Cmd-Q bound to Cmd-Opt-Q for Safari only—and yet there's no Apple-blessed way of changing _those_ shortcuts, when it clearly had the architecture in place to allow it. That always irritated me.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse