Putting your Keyboard on Steroids with Karabiner Elements

swyx 2020-08-28

Today I joined John Lindquist’s Twitch stream to learn Karabiner Elements!

My interest stems from 2 directions:

my recent RSI explorations
a general interest in productivity and automation - I have heard a great deal from folks like Wes Bos how much TextExpander and Alfred help them in productivity, and I suspect I am not taking as full advantage of these tools as I should be.

Friends like Brandon Bayer use Karabiner to prevent bad (for RSI) key combinations, and both John and Vadim use it to do “Home Row Computing”.

What is Karabiner Elements?

On its website, it describes itself as “A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for macOS”. It is free and open source.

I have also heard it called a “key remapper”, but I don’t think that describes the full range of what it does, because “map from A to B” is just the bare minimum of the possibility.

Setting up Karabiner and Goku

After downloading, the next move was to set up Goku. Karabiner has a verbose JSON DSL - Goku lets you write a terser Clojure based EDN format that compiles to that JSON.

brew install yqrashawn/goku/goku
cd /Users/yourusername/.config
touch karabiner/karabiner.json
touch karabiner.edn
# prepopulate the edn with something from https://github.com/yqrashawn/GokuRakuJoudo/blob/master/tutorial.md
goku

This will give you something to start with.

The EDN language

EDN is a dialect of Clojure. This is basic EDN:

{:main [
  {:des "hello world"
   ; comments use semicolons
   :rules [
      [:a :b] ; map a key to b key
   ]}
]}

We didnt find the EDN VSCode Extension formatter to be very good, so we just manually formatted the file ourselves.

The array syntax is good for setting up multiple rules:

{:main [
  {:des "mapping some keys to the other"
   :rules [
      [:a :b] 
      [:c :d] 
      [:e :f] 
      [:g :h] 
   ]}
  {:des "combination keys"
   :rules [
      ; map "shift+spacebar" to " = "
      [{:key :spacebar :modi :left_shift} [:spacebar :equal_sign :spacebar]]
   ]}
]}

You can create layers to put Karabiner into modes:

{
     :layers {
        ; implement caps lock mode
        :caps_mode {:key :caps_lock :alone {:key :escape}}}
        ; implement vs code mode
        :applications {
            :code ["com.microsoft.VSCode"]
        }    
     :main [
    {:des "capslock layer"
    :rules [
        :caps_mode
            ; VIM MODE - hold caps and AJKL
            ; home row computing
            [:##h :left_arrow] ; even with f, still do left arrow
            [:##k :up_arrow]
            [:##j :down_arrow]
            [:##l :right_arrow]
            [:##f :left_option]
            [:##d :left_shift]
            ]}
    {:des "these only work when you are inside vscode"
    :rules [ 
        :code
            [:p :m] ; remap p to m INSIDE VSCODE
    ]}
     ]
}

You can even enable a multitouch extension to switch modes based on how many fingers you have on the touchpad!

{:des "trackpad2"
:rules [ 
    ; 2 fingers down
    [:condi ["multitouch_extension_finger_count_total" 2]]
        [:f :button2] ; 
        [:v [:button1 :!Cv]] ; go around and paste
        ; idea: g for cmd + click
]}

To see an expert’s edn file, see:

other ideas for things you can do:

Putting your Keyboard on Steroids with Karabiner Elements

What is Karabiner Elements?

Setting up Karabiner and Goku

The EDN language

More

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