Most comfortable and most safe (since Ukelele just creates standard macOS keyboard layouts, no low-level or kext stuff involved).
(Your standard US keyboard layout is full of glyphs you never use just use that space!) If you just want to have easy access to some glyphs you use very often, then go Ukulele, as linked above. I highly recommend to try Karabiner-Elements. 7 days on my computer, so I can’t really tell about safety-relevant things either.)Īnd I’m not a “system-ultra-clean” guy, just a normal “system-clean-and-get-rid-of-any-app-that-has-“Clean”-in-its-name” guy. (No safety concerns though, but the soft was only for max. If you run out of hotkeys, you should rethink your concept of how you are triggering your stuff.Īs mentioned above, this is just my biased (of course) opinion, because I had 100% negative experience with Karabiner. I will not use Karabiner (or any similarly low-level soft) unless I really feel the need to do so. You would only use them in contexts which accept text obviously. I am not sure either if you can combine a modifier key with a string to trigger text expansions, which is effectively what you are doing. I include a screen shot of one I still have on Keyboard Maestro, it gives me the prime symbol without having to fuss around. Whether that would be quicker than a modifier key + single letter is interesting. I don't know whether every symbol on the OS palette can be properly inserted: I assume they can? You can also set 'paste text' to only fire after a space and that is useful, I assume I could have used "xp" in that case for phi. I used 'xpi' for the trigger to give one example. Greek phi and psi, they worked fine: I am not sure if I had some 'style' issues though. I had a few logic symbols done that way at one time.
One use and that fully justifies the app for me.ĭid you try to make typed triggers for those symbols? I am sure you can insert them into a text expansion using the 'paste text' or even 'type text' action and trigger with a string. I only use it for changing the caps key to a "Hyper key". I am not an expert, can't even use terminal and I downloaded Karabiner with no problems.
I have seen Karabiner used - apparently quite successfully - in the MacSparky videos on KM as a way to free up additional combinations. So, if you run into any issues, it’s not an issue to get rid of for your suggestions. In any case, the good thing is that Karabiner (at least pre-Elements) comes with a working uninstaller.
I’ll give it again a try, somewhere in the future.Īlso the majority of people seem to have no issues at all.
Not really safety-related, but probably related to the fact that it works on pretty low level: Years ago I’ve written my custom layout with Ukelele, which I’m still using today (with some minor modifications from time to time). It has a bit of a learning curve but it comes with an excellent tutorial and manual, which also covers all macOS keyboard-layout basics. When it’s only about key mapping (regular keys and dead keys, not modifier keys), Ukelele is the way to go. You can create your own custom keyboard layouts with Ukelele.