A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a Xah Lee post that, among other things, mentioned how to set the hyper and super keys for use with Emacs. Lee uses them a lot because he has a bunch of private functions that he wants to bind to key sequences and most of the convenient sequences that don’t involve hyper or super are already used. I don’t have that problem because I don’t have as many private functions and because, not being as fanatical about efficiency as Lee, I’m content to let smex find the private functions that I do use.
Nonetheless, it is sometimes useful to have a hyper or super key even if you haven’t dedicated some spare keys on your keyboard to them. It turns out that there is a way of causing a keystroke to be modified by the hyper or super key: just type 【Ctrl+x @ h】 and the next key will be modified by “hyper”. Similarly, typing 【Ctrl+x @ s】 will cause the next key to be modified by “super”. If you wanted to modify by both hyper and super you can type 【Ctrl+x @ h Ctrl+x @ s】.
Actually, the same trick works for any of the modifier keys. You can get a complete list by typing 【Ctrl+x @ Ctrl+h】 but here is a quick summary.
Summary
| Key Sequence | Modifier |
|---|---|
| 【Ctrl+x @ S】 | Shift |
| 【Ctrl+x @ a】 | Alt |
| 【Ctrl+x @ c】 | Control |
| 【Ctrl+x @ h】 | Hyper |
| 【Ctrl+x @ m】 | Meta |
| 【Ctrl+x @ s】 | Super |