Meet My New Meta Key

Today, I had a brainstorm.

See, like most civilized people, I never use the Caps Lock key on my keyboard. But I have so many keyboard shortcuts in Illustrator that I frequently find myself having to mash down command-opt-shift-something. Which is annoying because it always requires two hands to press, and I’d really rather keep my right hand on my stylus.

So I brought up Karabiner, which I was already using to map the \ key to ‘forwards delete’, and told it to map Caps Lock to command-opt-shift. Which required visiting the system prefs to map Caps Lock to ’no effect’, then installing another piece of software from the same author to remap the key to a non-existant key, and writing a bit of XML to tell Karabiner to remap this fictional key to command-opt-shift. But I did it.

And now I can hit caps lock plus a letter key and bring up some very useful Illustrator shortcuts that I use on a pretty regular basis.

I am highly tempted to paint over ‘caps lock’ and draw ‘☆’ on the key instead, because I no longer have a caps lock. I have a new meta key.

Now if only I could tell OSX to show “⌥⇧⌘” prefixes to menu shortcuts as “☆” instead…

(I have some half-baked ideas involving adding a custom ligature to the font OSX uses for the menu bar, but that starts to sound like work.)

(Appendix: here is my custom.xml for Karabiner…

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>PC 'Menu' to ⌘-⌥-shift</name>
<identifier>remap.pc_menu_to_cmd_opt_shift</identifier>
<autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::PC_APPLICATION, KeyCode::COMMAND_L, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L | ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
</item>
</root>

…and a link to my current .kys file.)