Yesterday, I wrote about using a prefix keymap to help deal with the shortage of available key sequences. That’s a good solution for what Xah Lee calls take-a-break commands. For frequently used commands it’s more efficient to use the 【Hyper】 and 【Super】 modifier keys. These do have some commands bound to them but are hardly ever used so they are a good place to look for fast key sequences.
The problem is that modern keyboards, alas, no longer include them. I partially solved that problem by mapping the 【fn】 key to 【Hyper】. That’s easy to do with Emacs but it’s not the only solution. And, of course, it doesn’t address where to assign the 【Super】 key.
Grant Rettke has an excellent video post on how to map OS X keys to the Emacs modier keys. If you’re an OS X user, you should definitely take a look. Emacs is pretty flexible about mapping the OS X modifier keys to the Emacs modifier keys and let’s you do things like map the the right 【⌘ Cmd】 key to 【Super】 while leaving the left 【⌘ Cmd】 to serve its normal OS X functions.
Rettke even shows how you can toggle the special behavior of these keys on and off for various situations. The video is short and definitely worth watching if you work with OS X.