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Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

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Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#81
post #10
post #5

Not a shortcut exactly, but remap caps lock to ctrl. So much easier in terminal and for using shortcuts like ctrl-A & ctrl-E for beginning and end of line, etc.

Or to esc. Saves my vim pinky a lot of grief.

I forget what the tool was, but I recall someone mentioning they mapped CapsLock to ESC when tapped, and to Ctrl when held.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#83
I remap every single key on my keyboard into custom modifier. So my caps lock is escape on single press and cmd/opt/shift on hold.

My control key is a. My command key is e. I open apps by pressing w + . ie w+l opens VSCode. Press it again and it switches to previous app (under the hood w+l calls a Keyboard Maestro macro).

It’s quite awesome.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#84
post #22

Spectacle ( https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#keyboard-shortcuts ) will change your life with better/faster window management. And Karabiner Elements ( https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements ) to remap keys to something more useful (who uses Caps Lock anymore?)

I used Spectacle before but switched to Magnet now (https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/magnet/id441258766?l=en&mt=12). It's basically the same.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#86

Cmd+shift+/ - brings up help search to search through menu items. Huge feature to me over windows, Linux-based desktop environments. Not exactly a shortcut, but I once made a gesture-driven shortcut app ( https://thimblemac.com ) - it’s been on hiatus the past couple years but have been wondering if there’s value in it for programming work contexts.

Holy, this is really good. I have been using an extension on alfred for this purpose, now I can get rid of it. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#87
post #22

Spectacle ( https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#keyboard-shortcuts ) will change your life with better/faster window management. And Karabiner Elements ( https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements ) to remap keys to something more useful (who uses Caps Lock anymore?)

Iirc you can remap capslock in OS X settings, don't need an addon for that. Thought I'm sure Elements does a lot more than just that.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with Karabiner, you can make it so that a tap of caps lock emits an escape, while still being able to use it as a ctrl modifier when pressed in conjunction with other keys: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/document.html#configuration-c...

I don’t think karabiner elements supports that and I believe that the old karabiner no longer works with current versions of Mac OS

The latest version of Elements has supported this for several months, if not longer (I think they'd made it work for High Sierra at least, but I could be wrong about the exact timing.)

I use it for both Caps Lock -> Escape/Control and Return -> Return/Control and it's indispensible.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#89
post #81
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to esc. Saves my vim pinky a lot of grief.

I forget what the tool was, but I recall someone mentioning they mapped CapsLock to ESC when tapped, and to Ctrl when held.

It's Karabiner Elements on the Mac.

On Linux you can get it to do the same thing with a combination of xmodmap, setxkbmap and xcape (but it's fiddly) and on Windows with AutoHotkey (but it's fiddly) — neither are as easy to use as Karabiner Elements, but they do work.

Re: Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?

#90
post #82

Does anyone know a way to assign a keyboard shortcut to show and hide a specific app? I love this feature in iTerm2 and would like to have it for my browser and text editor as well.

I have it set up in Keyboard Maestro. It's useful, as if you also use Keyboard Maestro's app switcher (Cmd+Tab), you can set that up to never show certain apps in the switcher - apps like Spotify and Tweetbot that I always have open, but clutter the switcher.
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