Jose Luis Franconetti, Author at Mobile Jazz Blog – Page 2 of 2

We Need to Work Faster. At Mobile Jazz we really care about productivity. Most of us are programmers and designers working hard to create wonderful apps and great user experiences. We spend countless hours in front of a screen, so we think it’s worth spending some time configuring our machines to improve repetitive workflows. In this article we’ll present a list of useful tips to speed things up in OS X (Windows counterpart coming soon). So let’s get our hands dirty: Creating a New Key Called 'Hyper' Once upon a time, there was a keyboard known as Space Cadet. It was equipped with seven modifier keys: four bucky bits keys - Control, Meta, Super, Hyper and three shift keys - Shift, Top and Front. Nowadays, modern keyboards only include four - Control, Meta/Win, Super/Cmd and Shift. A couple of years ago Steve Losh wrote a pretty good article explaining how to replicate the additional Hyper key, simulated by combining key presses of Control, Option, Command and Shift at the same time. This new Hyper key can be used as a completely new modifier key, for any action we want, without removing the functionality of any existing shortcut, pretty neat! The primary use of the Hyper key is entirely up to you, but for me, it’s main usages are: A better app switcher (replacing OS X’s default behavior) A better window manager (drawing ideas from tile window managers like Xmonad, i3, dwm that are pretty common in Linux) Steve Losh provides interesting app shortcuts in his article: "Currently I use this 'namespace' for application switching. Instead of using the normal Command-Tab switcher, I have shortcuts for each individual app I use frequently. For example, Hyper-k switches to Firefox, Hyper-y switches to Twitter, and so on. This is better than Command-Tabing because I don’t have to worry about how many times I need to press it. Hyper-k always goes to Firefox no matter what, so I can easily burn that into my muscle memory." How to Setup. Most articles you find online around this topic will recommend remapping the Caps Lock key to Hyper, which if you think about it, makes sense. How often do you use that key to type in block caps? Probably not that often, and when you need to write in caps, you’ll probably just be pressing and holding the shift key to produce the same result. To set this up, you’ll need to use a few apps to trick OS X into changing the default behavior of Caps Lock. Firstly, you should remove the behavior of this key by doing the following: Open System Preferences Click on Keyboard Select the Keyboard tab. Click on Modifier Keys in the bottom right. Click on the Caps Lock dropdown and select No Action Next, you’ll need to install two apps, both of which are open source and free. These two programs enable you to remapping keys at a low level to recreate the functionality of the Hyper key. Download and install Seil After installation, run the program. Locate the Caps Lock key and change the code from 51 (default) to 80 (F19 - Mac keyboards only reach F12 so you don’t need to worry about overwriting anything) Next you’ll need Karabiner. This program will map F19 (which is now Caps Lock) and will simulate a keypress of Control, Shift, Option and Command to produce Hyper. As this combination is quite hard to produce by hand, no applications already use it. Download and install Karabiner After installation, run the application. Click on the Misc and Uninstall tab. Click on Open private.xml from the Custom Settings section. Right click on the private.xml file and open it with your preferred code editor. Copy the following snippet and paste it into the private.xml file Save your changes and return to the Karabiner app. Click on the Change Key tab. Click on the Reload XML button. Finally, enable the item named Remap Caps Lock to Hyper Congratulations, your new Hyper key has been set up and is now ready for you to assign actions to. Create Custom Shortcuts to Common Applications. As we mentioned before, we can assign any actions to the new Hyper key, like Steve Losh, we’re going to create shortcuts to our most frequently used apps and settings. For this, you’ll need one more app called Keyboard Maestro, there are alternatives, but this app is rock solid and easy to use. On the app’s website, Keyboard Maestro does a pretty good job introducing itself: "Whether you are a power user or a grandparent (or both!), your time is precious. So why waste it when Keyboard Maestro can help improve almost every aspect of using your Mac. Even the simplest things, like typing your email address, or going to Gmail or Facebook, launching Pages, or duplicating a line, all take time and add frustration. Let Keyboard Maestro help make your Mac life more pleasant and efficient." How to Setup. The creation of a new shortcut is really straightforward: Download and install Keyboard Maestro and open the app. Navigate to the Global Macro Group folder (inside will be a list of your defined macros) To add a new one shortcut, click on the plus button at the bottom of the Macros group. This will create an empty Untitled macro, rename it to the app you want to navigate to. Click on the New Trigger button and select the This hot key option. Next you can click on the box to record the shortcut. Press your new Hyper key with an additional key to capture it (make sure the option is pressed is enabled) Next, click the New Action option and a new panel will be displayed listing a fair few options. Use the search option, typing ‘file’ Select the option Open a File, Folder or Application and select the application you want. And voila, you’re done. Remember to repeat each step for all applications you’d like. Use a Window Manager. This is one of the most useful changes you can make to OS X’s default behavior. On modern desktops you can arrange your windows using your mouse which can be very time-consuming and well, boring. There are a lot of programs which can easily help to solve this problem, Moom (not free) for example, is one of them. As we’re looking for a mouse free experience, the best approach is to use an app like Amethyst which mimics a tiling window manager. For those who are unfamiliar with tiling window managers, this Wikipedia article explains the concept very well: "In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor." Amethyst is a free, open source and (at the time of writing this article) very stable app. Our idea here is to use Amethyst with our new Hyper key to manage all windows with ease. How to Setup. Download, install and open Amethyst After installation open the app and head to its preferences. Change all shortcuts to use Hyper key. That’s it! Further Reading, Resources and Articles. The documentation available on this topic is quite extensive (Google has a ton to offer), but if you’re looking to learn more, I’d really recommend these two articles: A Modern Space Cadet by Steve Losh. This is the original article which started all the rage on productivity in OS X. It’s a quite extensive article explaining the reasons behind why it is so useful to create the Hyper key. Work more efficiently on your Mac (for developers) by Mike Solomon. A really valuable article showing more tips and tricks to optimize your OS X settings even further (and was the source of inspiration of this post).

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