We spend so much time at our keyboards that it’s important that you feel comfortable when using them. There are certain keys that have always felt uncomfortable to me because I have to stretch my fingers to use them, or I have to put my hand in some weird position to press a combination of keys at once.
The main two keys have I have problem with are:
Caps Lock has to be the most useless key ever, but it’s actually in a great position on the keyboard. When you are typing, it’s right there next to your little finger. It would be so much better if keyboard designers put a useful key there instead.
Fortunately there is a way to remap you Caps Lock to other keys.
You can modify keys using the Keyboard preferences pane in MacOS.
System Preferences > Keyboard
Under there you’ll see the “Modifier Keys…” button.
If you click on that, you’ll see you can remap the following keys to other keys.
So, for example, if you wanted to move Ctrl to Caps Lock, you can do that. At least that saves the weird hand position for Ctrl, and as we’ve already said, no one ever uses Caps Lock anyway.
This is all fine, but we can do even smarter things using other tools.
Karabiner-Elements is a useful keyboard customiser for Macs. Yes, if you have a fancy pants keyboard, you can probably use some custom software for your keyboard, but Karabiner-Elements is generic and works across all keyboards.
With Karabiner-Elements you can pretty much customise your keyboard anyway you want. There are some good community rules found here - https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/
As I mentioned at the top of this, the two main keys I have problems with are Escape and Ctrl, and Karabiner-Elements gives me a great option here.
Yep, my Caps Lock is now two keys. Might sound like an odd combination, but try it for a day and it will soon become part of your muscle memory.
I actually have the Modern Space Cadet modification installed, but only use the first rule it provides.
So the point of this post isn’t to say everyone should remap Caps Lock to Escape and Ctrl, but really to show you that you don’t have to stick with what you have out of the box. We are using these machines everyday and it’s useful to know you can make small changes like this to make yourself a little bit more comfortable.
Be warned though, that muscle memory soon sets in, and I’m always switching to SHOUTING CASE WHEN I USE SOMEONE ELSES MACHINE!
Developer, tinkerer, occasionally useful
