gabrielelana/engelbart

Mac keyboard hack to have more reachable modifier keys

What is this?

This is a customized configuration for Karabiner to make a keyboard home row to behave like Douglas Engelbart's chord device but only for "difficult to reach but very useful" keys

At least it's started this way... Later I started to use also the row above and below the home row, all keys far more reachable than the ones they replace

NOTE: Unfortunately this only work in OSX. If you are like me who works in Linux virtual machines hosted by OSX then you can have the best of both worlds.

Why?

• My development environment is made of Vim, Zsh, Tmux and i3 (a tiled window manager), let's say that I need a lot of key bindings, avoiding clashes with "only" two modifiers (CONTROL and ALT) is not easy
• I'm not getting younger, twisting my hand and my wrist all day long to reach those modifier keys was causing me some pain
• Being able to stay more in the home row is the ultimate keyboard efficiency goal

How it works?

When you simultaneously press two keys they will be mapped to another (convenient) key. All the mappings are symmetric (this resolves another issue that many keyboards have)

• D+F to CONTROL_L
• J+K to CONTROL_R
• S+D to OPTION_L (aka META_L in Linux)
• K+L to OPTION_R (aka META_R in Linux)
• E+F to ESCAPE
• J+I to ESCAPE
• W+F to DELETE
• J+O to DELETE
• E+R to Vim's LEADER
• U+I to Vim's LEADER
• C+V to CONTROL_L+OPTION_L
• M+, to CONTROL_R+OPTION_R
• X+V to CONTROL_L+SHIFT_L
• M+. to CONTROL_R+SHIFT_R
• X+C to OPTION_L+SHIFT_L
• ,+. to OPTION_R+SHIFT_R
• Z+V to CONTROL_L+OPTION_L+SHIFT_L
• M+/ to CONTROL_R+OPTION_R+SHIFT_R

Now, this is already something, but I wanted to go beyond, towards the mythical Space Cadet Keyboard, I wanted to have all those modifier keys... Unfortunately Karabiner doesn't support those key codes... Fortunately inside a Linux VM I can (with xmodmap) remap some strange/unused keys into those key codes... There we go

• S+F to KEYPAD_1 and then via xmodmap to HYPER_L
• J+L to KEYPAD_2 and then via xmodmap to HYPER_R
• A+F to KEYPAD_3 and then via xmodmap to SUPER_L
• J+; to KEYPAD_4 and then via xmodmap to SUPER_R

My Vim's LEADER works the same way

• C+V to KEYPAD_5 and the via xmodmap to NO_BREAK_SPACE
• M+; to KEYPAD_6 and the via xmodmap to NO_BREAK_SPACE

I've mapped the Vim's Leader to some strange character that I could never type with a direct key of my keyboard so that I could have leader mappings in insert mode, but that's another story, you could skip this part or you could email me if you wanna know more 😄

How to use it

• Install Karabiner
• Go to "Preferences" > "Misc & Uninstall" > "Open private.xml"
• Replace the default private.xml file with engelbart.xml
• Go to "Change Key"
• Hit "Reload XML"
• A section called "Engelbart" should appear
• Enable the mappings you want to use
• Enjoy :-)

Last tip

With Seil I've remapped my CapsLock to Fn key, so that I can have yet another (sort of) modifier key in my home row! What I do with Fn? With Karabiner I've remapped Fn+{H,J,K,L} to... I'll let you guess what :-)

engelbart's Issues

Add sticky to chorded modifiers

I was thinking if it's possible to add sticky as an option to newly defined modifiers. I've already tried activating sticky modifiers from OSX System Preferences panel and from within Karabiner ("Sticky modifiers keys). Both are only affecting the default modifiers key (triggered by physical ctrl, opt keys). I've already tried fiddling around with some settings, but my Karabiner voodoo is quite poor, so I was wondering if you know how to add something like that.

One way they could apear in the UI is to have the current items + duplicated items with "sticky enabled".
Obviously having "Show sticky modifiers state" checked in Karabiner/Preferences/Status Message should be respected.