⌨ Toward a more useful keyboard

This setup has historically relied heavily on Karabiner. According to the Karabiner site:

Karabiner does not work on macOS Sierra at the moment.

We are developing Karabiner-Elements which provides simple key modification for macOS Sierra at first. (Karabiner-Elements works well on macOS Sierra. We are working on fixing several remaining issues.)

We'll start updating for the full featured Karabiner for Sierra after Karabiner-Elements is completed.

I have high hopes for all a full-featured Karabiner coming to Sierra 🤞, but in the meantime, I'd :heart: to have as much of this setup working on Sierra as possible.

This branch represents a work-in-progress attempt to port the majority of this repository's pre-Sierra functionality to Sierra. Presently, the tools available on Sierra lack the power and flexibility available in Karabiner. Given those limitations, porting the previous functionality to Sierra will likely involve compromises. It's unlikely to be an exact port.

TODO

• [x] A more useful caps lock
  • [x] Tap caps lock for escape
  • [x] Hold caps lock for control
• [x] Enable navigation via the home row (See README 📝)
  • [x] Left/down/up/right
  • [x] Previous/next word
    • [x] In most apps
    • [x] In iTerm2
  • [x] Start/end of line
  • [x] Page down/up
  • [x] Select while navigating
  • [x] Delete previous/next word
  • [x] Delete to start/end of line
• [x] Enable other commonly-used actions on or near the home row (See README 📝)
  • [x] Previous/next tab
  • [x] First/last tab
  • [x] Split panes horizontally/vertically in iTerm2
  • [x] Move left/up/down/right by one pane in iTerm2
• [x] Window management using keyboard shortcuts on or near the home row
  • [x] Send window left (left half of screen) - control + s, h
  • [x] Send window down (bottom half of screen) - control + s, j
  • [x] Send window up (top half of screen) - control + s, k
  • [x] Send window right (right half of screen) - control + s, l
  • [x] Send window to upper left - control + s, i
  • [x] Send window to upper right - control + s, o
  • [x] Send window to lower left - control + s, ,
  • [x] Send window to lower right - control + s, .
  • [x] Send window to center of screen - control + s, space
  • [x] Resize window to fill the screen - control + s, enter
  • [x] Send window to next monitor - control + s, n
• [x] Hyper key for quickly launching apps
  • [x] Use right option key as hyper key
  • [x] hyper + a to open iTunes ("A" for "Apple Music")
  • [x] hyper + b to open Google Chrome ("B" for "Browser")
  • [x] hyper + c to open Hackable Slack Client ("C for "Chat")
  • [x] hyper + d to open Remember The Milk ("D" for "Do!" ... or "Done!")
  • [x] hyper + e to open Atom Beta ("E" for "Editor")
  • [x] hyper + f to open Finder ("F" for "Finder")
  • [x] hyper + g to open Mailplane 3 ("G" for "Gmail")
  • [x] hyper + t to open iTerm ("T" for "Terminal")
• [x] Markdown formatting
  • [x] Italics (Wrap the currently-selected text in single asterisks) - control + m, i
  • [x] Bold (Wrap the currently-selected text in double asterisks) - control + m, b
  • [x] Strikethrough (Wrap the currently-selected text in double tildes - control + m, s
  • [x] Inline link (Convert the currently-selected text to an inline link, using a URL from the clipboard) - control + m, l
• [x] Consider providing visual indicator when in (S)uper (D)uper Mode, WindowLayout Mode, and Markdown Mode
• [x] Update README

This is a work-in-progress and just a proof-of-concept right now.

I wanted to see if I could copy the functionality of Shush.app with Hammerspoon - turns out it was not that difficult. Basically, you hold a hot key to mute or unmute the mic, and double-tap the hot key to toggle hold-to-mute or hold-to-unmute. It's a super minimal app that just brings push-to-talk to macOS.

Building out the hotkey functionality is kind of funny in Hammerspoon - from what I could tell you can't use hs.hotKey or hs.hotKey.modal to listen for meta-only keys (like ⌥), so I ended up doing basically the same thing you did in control-escape.lua.

I got all the way to this point and realized that hs.audiodevice:setMuted(state) doesn't exactly work as advertised. I can see the current device being muted/unmuted in Audio MIDI Setup.app, but it still comes through in all of the applications I tested in.

It sounds like another option is to set the input volume to 0, but I've read that it doesn't completely mute the input, but just makes it really quiet. I'm going to try that next, but I just wanted to put this here to see if it is something you're interested in (and to see if maybe someone knows why setMuted doesn't actually work 😄).

Hello there, can't wait to adabting this keyboard

so I followed the insteractions and after running script/setup i'm left out with the following :

brew bundle can't satisfy your Brewfile's dependencies.
Satisfy missing dependencies with `brew bundle install`.

when I run brew bundle install it get stuck on

Tapping caskroom/cask
Using karabiner-elements

now when I redo script/setup i get

brew bundle can't satisfy your Brewfile's dependencies.
Satisfy missing dependencies with `brew bundle install`.
Tapping caskroom/cask
Using karabiner-elements

thanks

Steps to reproduce: Type "s" or "d" followed by another character in rapid succession (< MAX_TIME_BETWEEN_SIMULTANEOUS_KEY_PRESSES), such as se really fast. Instead of inserting se, es is inserted. Running on macOS 10.13.5 with Hammerspoon 0.9.66. This issue has been consistently reproduced with Hammerspoon running, and has been consistently absent with Hammerspoon closed.

I am not sure if this is related to big Sur or not. I am running brew under Rosetta2 otherwise there is no brew with Big Sur yet. I am using the recommended installation and with pre-installed hammerspoon and Karabiner elements brew fails to recognise the installations. If I delete the installations i get the error below, - still fialing to install the dependencies. Is this a Big Sur/Rosetta issue?.

❯ script/setup brew bundle can't satisfy your Brewfile's dependencies. Satisfy missing dependencies with brew bundle install. Error: Cask 'karabiner-elements' is unavailable: No Cask with this name exists. Installing karabiner-elements has failed! Error: Cask 'hammerspoon' is unavailable: No Cask with this name exists. Installing hammerspoon has failed! Homebrew Bundle failed! 2 Brewfile dependencies failed to install.

Problem

When switching to Russian language, I can't activate SuperDuper mode. At the same time, WindowsLayout and Markdown modes work just fine.

I use macOS Catalina

Is there any way to make it working?

I often find myself toggling push-to-talk on/off to gain confidence as to which mode I'm in (PTT vs. PTM), whereas this change will leave the "muted" status message on screen when in push-to-talk mode.

Running script/setup gives me this error: ln: /Users/harmtemolder/.config//karabiner: Operation not permitted Rewriting line 12 from ln -sfn $PWD/karabiner ~/.config/ to ln -sfn $PWD/karabiner ~/.config fixed this.

I'm not confident enough around ln to change the file, but happy to do so if you agree that this would improve it.

Hey Jason,

thank you for this awesome repo but I have a small problem with the 'Hyper' key. On the German Keyboard the 'right option' + lowercase 'L' writes the @-sign. Is it possible to remap that to 'Hyper' + lowercase 'L' ? I looked at the 'hyper.lua' file and it looks like I can only open apps or execute functions. I am not familiar with Lua so I was wondering what I would have to do to just send one symbol.

Best, Chris

When I'm pressing (s)+(d) and holding (space) to select text, it only works when moving forward (pressing (l) key) and not when moving backwards (pressing (h). So that means I cannot select the text that is before the cursor.

So to sum up, the key combination (s)+(d)+(space)+(h) is not working for me

Last night I upgraded from Big Sur 11.5 (Intel) to Big Sur 11.5.1. This morning I realized that most of my windows bindings weren't working. (I.E. ctrl-s + h)

All of the alpha bindings no longer work. The symbol bindings (,, ., space, return, etc.) still appear to be working.

I realized that my versions of Hammerspoon, Karabiner-Elements, and keyboard were all of out date. I spent a bit of time upgrading everything. When that didn't fix it, I removed my configuration and all of the apps and reinstalled from a fresh copy of keyboard.

Now with a fresh copy of everything, nothing has changed. Since I just upgraded to Big Sur 11.5.1 last night, something must have changed with macOS.

Any ideas?

Dear Jason,

I've been trying to install your keyboard on my Mac but when the bits are copied to the terminal the following error pops up:

fatal: destination path '/Users/cyril/.keyboard' already exists and is not an empty directory. Homebrew is required: http://brew.sh/

Does this mean the keyboard is already installed? If so I would like to know if there are any additional steps to the installation because I am not able to use it's features presently.

Thanks Cyril

When I load the Hammerspoon config (which loads this keyboard), for sometime the period character "." works as expected. Every key press of "." inserts the "." character.

Since the period is not remapped in any of the customized shortcuts, this is as expected.

However, after a while, consistently, I see that pressing the period key does not insert the period. Instead, the only way to insert a period is to consecutively press period twice (within a short time).

In order to insert every "." in this issue description, I had to press "." twice quickly to print it to the screen.

Now as I'm typing this, I'm reloading the Hammerspoon config. And all periods after this point was inserted with a single key press of "." .... -> each period corresponds to a single press now, after reloading the config.

This is an interesting issue. Any idea why this might be happening.

Hi, I recently starting using this set of code, but when I am in super-duper mode, I cannot hit f to go to command, as when I try things like cmd-z or cmd-c, nothing happens. Can someone tell me if I am doing anything wrong?