In an effort to reduce the pain I’ve been having in my wrists and forearms, I’ve been trying to pick up Dvorak again. Little did I know, there is yet another keyboard format called Colemak. It seems like it’ll be easier to pick up than Dvorak, and seems to offer a better experience than Dvorak in some ways.

Apart from this desire of switching an entire key layout, I started rethinking about the Caps Lock key. Colemak actually maps it to be Delete by default. Since I don’t use Caps Lock all that often, and I’m a crazy person about efficiency sometimes, I decided to follow through with remapping not only the Caps Lock, but other keys as well. (One side effect of this is that in certain programming languages, Caps Lock is nice for typing out constant names. Not a big deal, though.)

Anyway, digging around the Colemak site, I got to this page on how to remap Caps Lock. got me to these two wonderful Preference Panes.

Disclaimer: Yeah, you saw this coming. This might cause your computer to erupt in flames, but that doesn’t mean you should come over and do the same to my apartment. Moving along.

To get your Caps Lock to function as Delete, first install: PCKeyboardHack. There will be a checkbox to change Caps Lock to 51 (Delete).

This will make it work, but you won’t be able to hold it down to insert multiple deletes. To get this working fully, install: KeyRemap4MacBook. Go into “General” and turn on “Enable CapsLock LED Hack”. However, for me, I’m unable to turn off the Caps Lock light. It decided it’s going to stay on forever.

In summary, PCKeyboardHack seems like it’s used to just turn on the ability to map the Caps Lock to delete, and KeyRemap4MacBook seems to do “everything else”.

Which brings me to the next point.

vi/vim Fun

I’ve been looking into getting a system-wide way to mimic the modal input style that vi/vim offers. Short of writing a kernal extension (because I’m not that awesome), I found the “Vi Mode” in KeyRemap4MacBook fairly useful.

You won’t be able to hit escape and move around with hjkl, but you will be able to move around with Right Command + hjkl. This means, of course, you will be sacrificing the application specific shortcut keys involving the Right Command, but I’ve actually gotten used to using the Left command for most of my shortcuts.

More Keyboard Silliness

There are so many things you can mess around with using KeyRemap4MacBook. I started thinking about some of the keys I rarely use, and thought about how to remap them to be more efficient.

Like the tilde, for example. I mapped that to be the Escape key if no modifiers were pressed. (Command + ` after Command + Tab cycles through applications backwards, so other than that case, now the backtick is escape. I don’t have to stretch as much.) I don’t know if I like this, but I’m sure willing to try it out.

Oh, and remember to mess around with the “[Key Repeat] Initial Wait” and “[Key Repeat] Wait”. I lowered those to fit my ever insane need to move around faster on the keyboard. I keep trying to get those values lower and lower as time goes on.

And that ends yet another weird entry about a very weird obscure topic that I care way too much about. Thanks for reading.