We are going to walk through creating a system to bring uniformity to our apps with a single set of keyboard shortcuts. We'll start by learning how to install and configure the required apps, then, later on, I'll introduce the system of keyboard shortcut organization I use every day. Note for Windows and Linux users: While the principles outlined here are universal, the tools are Mac only. Tools do exist to accomplish the same results on other operating systems. It may require extra research to apply these principles to non-Mac computers. The apps that are easiest to customize explicitly allow users to declare keyboard shortcuts in the settings. Many other apps expose shortcuts through menus that can be overridden at the system level, but this gets tedious if you you have more than a few shortcuts you want to override. And some apps provide keyboard shortcuts without offering any way to override them, or worse, don't even offer keyboard shortcuts at all. We are going to learn how to train our keyboards to map the key combos you want to use to the key combos the apps on your computer expects. Command+P EverywhereĪs a long time Sublime Text user, I couldn't imagine life without ST's Quick Open Palette, which is triggered with Cmd+P. With this palette, I can trigger this shortcut and just type the name (or partial name) of something I want to open without needing to navigate the interface. Over time, I've noticed other apps also offer similar quick open palettes. However, until a recent update, Slack’s quick open palette, triggered with Cmd+K, had no way to override it in a setting or menu.Īs described above, the ideal scenario would be one where I could always use the same keyboard shortcuts to do the same things in all of my apps. So I just need a way of converting the Cmd+P combo I have already memorized into the Cmd+K combo Slack expects. Let's take a look at how we can accomplish this. There are two primary tools, plus a third companion tool, that we will install in order to map our Cmd+P combo to Cmd+K within Slack–and while we're at it, we'll be providing a foundation to build an entire system of custom keyboard shortcut mappings for any app. The first tool we'll install is Karabiner-Elements. Karabiner is a fast, customizable tool that allows us us to remap the keys on a Mac at the kernel level. Once Karabiner is installed, we’re going to install Goku, the "companion tool" I mentioned previously. Goku is an abstraction layer that allows you to define your Karabiner configuration in a much more human-friendly format. Note: Karabiner supports multiple profiles, but as mentioned in the docs, Goku requires a Default profile in order to generate a Karabiner config so we will need to make sure this profile is present. The second "primary tool" we need is Hammerspoon, a Mac automation tool we'll use alongside Karabiner-Elements. Once you have these tools installed and running, the first thing we want to do is add some file watchers for both Karabiner and Hammerspoon. These watchers make their parent applications automatically recompile and reload config files after we make any changes.įirst, we'll need to download Hammerspoon's ReloadConfiguration Spoon here and then move it to ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons. Next, add the following to ~/.hammerspoon/a: Karabiner elements key codes download# This script installs two watchers: one for Goku (to update Karabiner) and one for Hammerspoon.
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