Not long ago, I purchased my first 60% keyboard. In addition to the charming aesthetic it brought my desk, I also found the tactility of the board to be far superior when compared to the rubber dome keys I'd grown used to as a mac user. As someone who presses thousands of keys a day, I can't recommend a mechanical keyboard highly enough.
One of the trade-offs with this new board was a loss of functionality — like the lack of dedicated arrow keys. But, with necessity being the mother of invention, I've leveraged Karabiner Elements to help bring some of this functionality back, while also adding new functionality to my mac keyboard.
One of the perks of using KE instead of saving my keyboard profile in my keyboard's memory is that I don't have to retrain my fingers when I leave my board at home — now my keybindings are consistent between my macbook pro and my mechanical board.
This repo contains my personal KE profile. Feel free to use, abuse, comment, and improve.
Note: This file is read from top to bottom and the order of rules is very important.
Caps lock is used for a few things. When pressed alone, it becomes the delete_or_backspace key. When held down, it becomes the fn key. This is helpful for using awed and jikl keys as arrows.
Every now and again, I need to enable caps lock — usually for formatting text when text-transform: uppercase is not an option. To address this, I've mapped the right_shift key, when held for 1.5 seconds, to caps_lock. I've chosen the right over left because I often press and hold the left key to modify the arrow keys.
One of the main reasons caps_lock has been remapped to fn is so my fingers don't have to leave home row in order to use the arrow keys. By holding caps, which has now been remapped to fn, I can use the wasd and ijkl keys as arrows.
I often use shift as a modifier for arrow keys, mostly for quickly moving elements in design programs. To address this need, press and hold fn (caps_lock) and press spacebar. This is remapped to left_shift.
IMO, one of the more annoying parts of working on a 60% keyboard as a developer is the loss of the tilde/grave accent keys. In JS, the tilde is an operator and the grave accent is used for template strings — I use them a lot. I also quite like the escape key at the top left of the board, so I wrote a script that gives me the best of both worlds. The grave_accent_and_tilde key has been mapped to escape by default and when held down (for > .1s) it is mapped back to the grave_accent_and_tilde key.