Bye Karabiner, hello again Keyboard Maestro
A few months ago I re-weclomed Alfred back into my nerd rig and bumped Keyboard Maestro out of it. Now I’m re-welcoming Keyboard Maestro and showing Karabiner-Elements the door. I can tolerate having two tools constantly brow-beating all my keystrokes, but for some reason having three of them makes me angsty.
Why Keyboard Maestro?
Keyboard Maestro and Alfred have a fair amount of overlap. They’re both good at text snippets. They’ve both got good clipboard managers. They both can trigger a wide range of automation scripts.
One of Keyboard Maestro’s differentiating features is its ability have app-specific macro groups. That is, groups of automation rules that are active only when you’re in a particular app.
Here’s an example. To minimize the load on my poor little brain, I’d like the keyboard shortcuts to be consistent across my primary editors: Bear.app (my personal notes), Obsidian (my work notes; don’t want to commingle in Bear), and Google Docs (shared work docs).
I can customize the shortcuts within Obsidian, but not within Bear.app or Google Docs. Here are a few examples of the differences:
| Action | Bear.app shortcut | Google Docs shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Heading | ⌘<number> |
⌥⌘<number> |
| Bulleted list | ⌘L |
⇧⌘8 |
| Move line up/down | ⌥⌘<arrow> |
⇧⌃<arrow> |
With Keyboard Maestro, I have a macro group that remaps the keys to make Bear.app consistent with Google Docs. That macro group is set to be active only when I’m in Bear.app, so it doesn’t muck with anything else. That’s cool.
Keyboard Maestro has a few other tricks up its sleeve, but I’ll save them for another post.
Why not Karabiner-Elements?
I was using Karabiner only to turn my Caps Lock key into a “Hyper” key,
remapping it to Command + Control + Option + Shift.
That lets me use the Hyper key for hotkey triggers that are won’t conflict with anything else on the OS.
That’s nice.
But it’s also nice to remap Caps to Control instead, since there are a number of Emacs-style, Control-based shortcuts baked into macOS, and it’s much easier to reach Caps with my pinky than the little Control key on the modern Apple keyboards. So I reverted to that setup and uninstalled Karabiner.
Quick note on complexity
I value simplicity and try to use it as a guide when making these sorts of decisions. Managing these apps and remappings and automations and whatnot cost some simplicity points. But I also take a simplicity hit by having to memorize different sets of keyboard shortcuts and cognitively hop between them dozens or maybe even hundreds of times per day. At the moment, per my napkin math, my approach pencils out to be simpler than the alternative. But it’s something I’ll keep an eye on as I cobble together more and more tricks in these tools.
Out of time! Haven’t edited this! Bye!