Writer-friendly keyboard remapping
Most keyboard remapping stuff considers coders, gamers, that sort of thing. A lot of 'Vim' talk. Fair enough, they are the power users. I'm none of those things but I wanted my Mac typing experience to be better. Or at least, not quite so miserable.
How can I make it better for writing stories? To reprioritise around the sort of typing I actually do. One big aim is to hold down shift as little as possible.
For instance. When do I ever use a \ back slash? Basically never. How often do I use "speech marks"? A million times a day. But I get a back slash with one tap and need to use the shift for speech marks.
Brackets are another one. The easiest brackets to type are square brackets. Which I do use, especially writing in markdown. How often do I use curly brackets? Once a month? Less? And asking all those questions - do I use forward slash or question marks more? Question marks.
The other thing is macros, or macro-type things. Now, my non-Mac setup has predictive text so it easily handles character names. I can garble almost anything onto the keyboard and it will know what character I am talking about. I want that. I'm not doing all the accents and apostrophes. Some character names if I have to write them on the Mac I just put the initial then paste the whole thing in afterwards. But if I remap it... that's the same thing. No one can have the same initials but that's good practice anyway.
So, some suggestions for writer-friendly remaps:
- make speech marks more accessible. I've moved mine to the back slash next door
- switch the question mark and slash so you use shift for the slash instead
- rotate the brackets around. I've gone (), [], {} in order of priority so () doesn't need a shift, [] is above them, and {} is right up on the number line
- the Mac doesn't have a proper delete button? Just backspace? I mapped right shift (which I never use) to 'Delete forward', which is apparently what it's actually called
- character names. I type the first initial with the Hyper Key (on Caps Lock) and presto
- this is also just generally super useful for your email address, phone number etc
- I also did a macro to take the word I have highlighted, open the find tool, paste it in, and hit enter. Which was previously three cmd steps plus enter
- same with taking the word and opening a new tab on it (for definitions, synonyms etc) when I'm not right-clicking a mouse
I used Karabiner-Elements. Which felt like overkill but none of this is as simple as I thought. In fact, it was approximately a thousand times more complicated than I thought. I had to do it all in JSON, for crying out loud. But once I had the basic template I was just swapping stuff in and out.
While I'm at it... can I change a lower case i surrounded by spaces to automatically be upper case? No. My phone and tablet can do this. My phone and tablet automatically capitalise new sentences. But an actual laptop? Beyond its capabilities, apparently.
Speaking of my phone and tablet, I have Colemak on them and remapped some keys on the mechanical keyboard. So I know a nicer experience is possible, even if none are perfect yet.
Now the only thing I have to work on is my muscle memory.