A while back I wanted to setup hotkeys for the various apps I use. Mostly because I was annoyed by the cognitive effort you need to make to figure out how often you need to press Alt + Tab exactly to get to the app you want.

It seemed like a good idea to use Capslock as a modifier key. This way I could be sure I wouldn’t override any other keybindings. Figuring out how to do this I stumpled upon an excellent post by Steve Losh “A Modern Space Cadet”. It’s described in detail how to set Capslock to Hyper - a fifth modifier key. I then created bindings like Hyper + S which will focus Safari etc. Exactly what I was looking for.

Then I found something in his post I wasn’t looking for: instructions to map my shift keys to parentheses. It sounded crazy at first but doing mostly LISP-y stuff these days I tried it anyways.

Now I wouldn’t want to live without it anymore. It’s just so much easier than Shift + {9,0}. Also the Shift keys still work as they do usually when pressed in combination with other keys.

A few days ago I was typing some stuff at a collegues computer and it immediately felt cumbersome when having to type a parenthesis.