Hyper Keys and Mouse Buttons With Karabiner

I’ve got a hankering for keyboard shortcuts.

I’m all about pressing a key without having to worry about which application I’m in and my computer doing something useful.

This noble pursuit has taught me one thing: there’s never enough keys™.

Good old Vim has demonstrated the value of a trusty leader key in the war to get more keys. So, I undertook a holy mission to find the mythical macOS hyper key, and along the way found the deep well of keyboard customisation that is Karabiner-Elements.

Hyper key

I’ve set up Karabiner-Elements so that if I combine the backslash key with other keys, it acts as the hyper key 1.

I use this hyper key as a prefix to bind global shortcuts without having to crush my fingers, and soul, into a ball.

Here’s a selection of the shortcuts I keep behind this hyper key prefix:

  • \+t brings my time tracking app into focus.
  • \+s locks my screen.
  • A bunch of shortcuts move windows around via Moom.
  • A couple of shortcuts switch my audio output between my headphones and speakers via an Alfred workflow.

Mouse buttons

macOS doesn’t natively recognise the extra buttons on my new mouse which sucks because: there’s never enough keys™.

So, I was chuffed to find that Karabiner recognises these extra mouse buttons and can bind them to key sequences.

Here’s a look at my bindings:

My Karabiner-Elements preference

I miss the sideways scrolling of the Magic Mouse, but I’ve set up Karabiner so that if I hold down my scroll wheel button, I can scroll left and right. It works reasonably well and means I don’t need to reach for shift while spinning the scroll wheel to side-scroll.

I map button 4 of my mouse to play and pause my music. The media keys on my keyboard are a chord away, but usually, it’s easier to press a single button instead.

I map button 5 to a shortcut2 assigned to the Meet Mute Chrome extension. This shortcut toggles mute on my current running Google Meet meeting, which is killer.

The config

So there you go. Maybe you’ll find something useful in my Karabiner-Elements config file that you can steal.

And may you never run out of keys.

  1. The hyper key on the Mac is a combination of Ctrl+Command+Option+Shift which is the equivalent of a dragon costume with four people in it, but hey, it does the job. ↩︎

  2. Command+shift+d because the extension doesn’t recognise the hyper key chord for some reason. ↩︎

∙ Productivity, Tools