Profiles

[pqrs-org]

Profiles

[awinecki]

@tiagocardosoweb have a look at #67.

If you're using Alfred, you can use Karabiner Elements Profile Switcher.

[sitaktif]

It's nice to have workarounds but I believe it would add a lot of value to Karabiner Elements to integrate this issue in a standalone way. Not everybody uses Alfred or is keen on setting up some crazy .plist agent config.

To give a rationale for that feature, here is a rather generic use-case:

• User has a laptop and an external keyboard. The keyboard is used at work, the buillt-in keyboard is used at home.
• On all his keyboards, user wants to use a feature that only Karabiner-Elements provides (say: Caps Lock as "escape" when short-pressed, and as Control when long-pressed - this one will probably get popular with the new Touchbar MBPs).
• On his external keyboard only, user needs the option and command keys to be swapped.

This use-case is not currently covered by Karabiner Elements.

Enabling/disabling keyboards per-profile seems like an elegant and intuitive way to solve the problem of assigning different shortcuts to different keyboards.

Related issues: #31 #138 #162 #303 #488
Workarounds: #67

[awinecki]

I think it's no longer needed to use any workarounds, with the latest version of Karabiner Elements (I have 0.90.86) you can switch profiles using tray icon actions:

Yay! 🍾 ✨

[vbauerster]

Profile switching does not work in v0.90.86. I mean when different profile is selected, it is not activated. I have to restart (quit and start over again) Karabiner Elements in order to activate the profile. I use external keyboard with different profile, and it is very inconvenient to restart KE every time I switch the profile. My karabiner.json

[vbauerster]

I have opened new issue #634

[zjunothing]

Hi @awinecki , i know there is a tray icon and i can switch profiles using mouse.
But i still want a way that can change my profile via keyboard. Do you have any idea?
Thanks in advance.

[zjunothing]

I have got a nice workaround i think:

(Assume i have two profile: Debug & Default )
Write a script (eg. named Debug-profile.sh):
gsed -i '/"name": "Debug"/!b;n;c"selected": true,' ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json; gsed -i '/"name": "Default"/!b;n;c"selected": false,' ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json
and a script (eg. named Default-profile.sh):
gsed -i '/"name": "Debug"/!b;n;c"selected": false,' ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json; gsed -i '/"name": "Default"/!b;n;c"selected": true,' ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json
(if you are using linux, just use sed, if your are using mac, just install gsed(gnu-sed) via brew install gsed

and if you want switch to one profile ,just run the debug-profile.sh or default-profile.sh, you can surely add them in your .bashrc and make alias.

[awinecki]

@zjunothing if you're an Alfred app user, you can try using my workflow: https://github.com/awinecki/karabiner-elements-profile-switcher. I haven't updated since it's possible via tray menu, but it seems to still work – just tried it :). Other than that, I think your workaround with gsed looks perfect, with some nice aliases that could be handy.

[starsy]

@awinecki don't you find manual switch-over awkward? i made some enhancement to original KBE to support per-device key mapping, please try this fork: https://github.com/starsy/Karabiner-Elements, usable built package can be found in the "release" section.

@sitaktif believe this can solve your problem in a simpler way.

Screenshot:

[awinecki]

This looks amazing, @starsy. Thanks for doing this, I will definitely try it out. Would love to see this merged into primary KBE repo.