How easy or hard is it for you to use Karabiner Elements?

Software
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Karabiner Elements is an often recommended app for changing hotkeys on macOS, and has been for me multiple times, but everytime I do its jarring. While it is a powerful app if you know how to use it, I’ve come to realize that there are a bunch of issues with the way the app works.

To make simple modifications, you have to find the individual key you want to remap through a series of dropdown menus, why not just press the keys you want to remap?! And complex modifications is where it becomes difficult. It consists of JSON files you write,. All of which are stored in one file, which while you can edit with an external text or code editor, is very tedious, provides no error messages, and doesn’t seem to be officially supported. The app’s JSON editor is also very tedious, telling you there’s an error on a specific line and area, but doesn’t show you and some the error messages aren’t too helpful. Multiple times I would make complex modifications based off of ones I would find online. While those would load fine for me, my changes wouldn’t and it would be a pain to troubleshoot.

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I find it indispensable – it’s one of the first programs I install immediately on a new Mac. I keep the configuration file on Dropbox so all I have to do it move that over and everything’s back to normal. In any case, I only have one mapping that I’ve amended from the downloadable ones, and that was no problem to set up as it was only a change of key name.

I don’t have many features set up. There’s only one Simple modification: I swap right opt and right cmd. It makes much more sense to have the right opt key next to the space bar if you use a lot of accents and keyboard navigation shortcuts, as I do.

And I only had four complex modifications:

Screenshot 2024-08-25 at 09.12.17
Screenshot 2024-08-25 at 09.12.172182×1226 251 KB

(I’m testing the multitouch modification, but don’t really use it.)

Three of these are straight-from-the-website modifications, which work with no modifications:

  • Caps Lock is now Escape when tapped, Control when held
  • Return is now Return when tapped, Control when held
  • Both shift keys together now toggle caps lock on and off.

The only downloaded modification I’ve altered is F12 → Hyper (or cmd-opt-ctl-shift). The base modification puts this new hyper key on Caps Lock, but that’s a complete waste of a home row key, so I move it out to F12.

The modification wasn’t difficult: if I remember correctly, all I had to do was replace Caps Lock with f12 in .config/karabiner/karabiner.json and it worked without a problem.

Otherwise, I remap the F7, F8, F9 keys to F17, F18, F19 and then use Keyboard Maestro to map them to Apple Music’s Rewind, Play, Forward actions to override macOS’s stupid way of insisting that whatever is playing in Safari takes precedence over Apple Music.

So I wouldn’t say I am an advanced user, but I do use most of the available features.

I can’t say I’ve found the program particularly hard to use as long as you stick to modifying what the experts have done, rather than trying to write something from scratch. It’s certainly much easier to use than anything I’ve ever found on Windows or Linux.