Xcape on macOS (Sort Of)

Yesterday I wrote about T V Raman’s post explaining how he uses the X Windows xcape command to provide extra keys and better ergonomics for Emacs. Raman has some nice ideas about improving the Emacs keyboard interface but they were, unfortunately, restricted to those using X Windows. That’s a lot of people, of course, but about a quarter of those who use Emacs are doing so on a Mac and Raman’s hack wasn’t available to them.

Jeremy Friesen to the rescue. Like me, he was intrigued by Raman’s post but unlike me he decided to do something about it. He had a head start because he’s a Karabiner-Elements user and Karabiner makes it easy to do the sort of thing described by Raman.

Take a look at Friesen’s post for the details. Not everyone will want to do this but if you think your workflow could benefit from overloading modifier keys to provide additional shortcuts and eliminate some chording, it’s nice to know it’s possible for Mac as well as X Windows users.

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