About

Karabiner-Elements in a nice tool for overriding MacOS keyboard shortcuts

My personal use-case is the desire to have more PC Style controls in place

This project mainly exists because the desktop UI is not very flexible, especially for "Complex modifications":

• No easy editing of "Complex modifications" from the UI itself
• Include / exclude rules are per individual manipulator, not "group of" manipulators
• Modifiers are per key code, not "group of" key codes
• No simple way to just "reverse" modifiers but keep same key codes
• No convenience of appending "left_" to "to" modifier list
• No convenience of just simple key code rules, instead only array-based macro "to" key code rules

Enhancing the UI seems like a larger task.. but for now:

• this Python script can mutate the Karabiner config file
• Karabiner-Elements reloads the file at runtime automatically already!

Prerequisites

Karabiner-Elements is installed and contains a named profile that matches a profile in this project

Usually this means renaming the default profile from "Default profile" to "Default"

Then you must create a dummy simple modification entry for any Apple keyboard devices in that profile

This will populate a device entry in the profile in the config file, which will be found and mutated by this script

Usage

Edit any profiles you would like

Run:

uv run src/main.py

Future

One day help simplify the Karabiner-Elements UI, so this project need not exist