Turning My Old MacBook Pro into a Productivity Dream (WITHOUT a Custom Keyboard!)

[@BenVallack]

I forgot to show the Karabiner setup for remapping the Cmd key to Meh. The config is in the Github link in the description which includes the 'Complex Modification' rule/config for the Cmd to Meh remap.

[@smoothoperatah]

My man. How the hell do you have all these keyboard layouts in your brain? Workman, colemak, graphite. I’m 1.5 months into colemak and I’ve almost completely lost QWERTY and am only at 40wpm with colemak (was at 80 with qwerty before).

[@BenVallack]

I definitely only keep one at a time! Using Graphite at the moment. I have a lot of Qwerty still in there but not really for fast normal typing. It's there for thumbs or iPad/iPhone though! I seem fine switching between the staggered and ortholinear/split though.

[@jammies701]

Nice vid mate, pretty basic tweaks, but I like how you did it because these are just too underutilized. Karabiner really is the best

[@johnnybottlerockets8667]

Hey Ben, love your videos. I used to use Karabiner Elements but since going down the custom keyboard rabbit hole myself, I’ve ended up switching to kanata, which is very similar to writing custom zmk or qmk firmware but can be used on any keyboard (you can filter by device name too if you only want to apply certain functionality to specific keyboards) and is cross platform. You can do some incredibly powerful things and managing it via code seems a lot more manageable than using a GUI to generate the karabiner json config.

[@BenVallack]

This looks very interesting! Cheers

[@Aidan0Griffiths]

Thanks Ben, definitely going to setup the automator script with claude for editing text.

[@ovi_dius]

Hey Ben! I noticed you are using the graphite keys on the home row to navigate vim. Did you remap them for vim?

[@BenVallack]

Yeah I basically just remapped the navigation keys and then one or two knock-on remaps were needed.

[@christianwooldridge406]

I’ve found that if you use ray cast and have hot keys for all the apps you use often and have a simple tiling window manager like rectangle there really is not a need for yabai or aerospace

[@BenVallack]

That is just shortcuts to specific apps right? I used to do that with Keyboard Maestro - perfectly good workflow. The Yabai approach just makes a bit easier to separate the app from the 'space'. I find that a pretty nice way of thinking about it.

[@christianwooldridge406]

@ yeah if you have more complex workspaces I see the appeal, for me I mainly just have a browser and text editor up with the occasional toggle of music, slack,terminal etc so it works well

[@pierrepreston7827]

@@BenVallackit’s much more than that. Ray cast is a spotlight replacement effectively. It does time zone conversion Windows management Clipboard history You can run scripts on it Etc. really cool tool for workflow

[@BenVallack]

Ah nice - will take a closer look!

[@pierrepreston7827]

@@BenVallack awesome! I would definitely be curious to know what you think of it. I work as a systems admin in a macOS environment and I find it super handy. Makes my workflow way more efficient. Ps. Been following you for a few years and you’re genuinely my favourite KZbinr. I’m really into biomechanics/movement for health, love EDC, love moto camping and tech etc so feel like I struck gold the day I found your videos. Wish you nothing but the best in your KZbin (& other adventures!)

[@JZL003]

I have a similar approach in some ways, and I highly highly recommend you go into your accessibility and go "reduce motion". I generally don't want all these animations but for changing workspaces , having it just pop into place without sliding makes my eyes feel better. I'm off Mac now so don't have it, but there's also as way of reducing the "reduced" animation delay time to basically 0, so changing workspaces makes it immediately change. You'll notice immediately how snappy and good it feels

[@JZL003]

I think it was some slightly esoteric terminal command but doesn't require disabling sip or anything to reduce the animation time to 0

[@no-nukez]

IIRC this is not possible these days without disabling SIP, but I could be wrong. I would certainly like to be disproven, as I have a work MacBook that absolutely cannot have SIP disabled, and I would kill for instant spaces switching

[@JZL003]

@@no-nukez I can guarentee that "reduce motion" is just a macos accessibility setting not related to SIP and that's the most important part to help my eyes. I don't know about reducing the delay to instantantous but as of ~9 months ago, I did it on a (non arm) mac with SIP always enabled

[@malpern]

Ben I actually spent this evening trying to make my Mac’s space bar act as a Meh key when held. I encounter the same reliability issues you mentioned. I tried again with Hammerspoon and got a little further but still not rock solid. I’m rather shocked this was so hard and that I couldn’t find an agreed upon solution. Do you understand why it works well in qmk or oryx but doesn’t (yet )work reliably in karabiner elements?

[@BenVallack]

Thanks so much for this! In terms of the hold behaviour, I think it comes down to the subtlety around the way it deals with rollover. This page shows really well how different different settings can affect things. zmk.dev/docs/keymaps/behaviors/hold-tap I assume Karabiner is using one of those varieties and that is stopping it working as we expect. Space is a key that would need to make the decision after the timeout (tap preferred). i.e if you rolled and released within the timeout it should just fire the space followed by the key. But if you roll and hold for the timeout it should then do the hold. I suspect Karabiner might not be able to do the deferred logic or something like that. I have set my Karabiner timeout to a high number to test this and the hold behaviour is always triggered the instant the second key is tapped. If you do this with a tap-preferred hold in ZMK it wold defer the out put until the timeout is reached. This is what allows for reliable home row mod type setups in proper custom keyboards. Would be great if Karabiner can add this functionality!

[@fullhalfadder]

you should look into rectangle window manager.

[@bartn4495]

That Quick Action trick with OpenAI sounds so full of potential! Thanks for sharing.

[@812jvjwr]

can i suggest raycast?

[@anthonvanderneut]

Have you used Yabai on a multi-monitor setup? I tried Aerospace on my 3 monitor portrait-landscape-portrait setup (driven from my Mac M1), had to move the positioning to get the stowage off-screen, but it was just to confusing to use IMO. A few years ago I had the same monitor setup driven from Linux, where only the landscape monitor would actually change desktop, that worked well for my workflow.

[@BenVallack]

Interesting, I've only tried on one monitor.

[@lpanebr]

After you got me hooked on my 36 key split keyboard, I simply can't use regular keyboards. How do you do it?

[@BenVallack]

I think using the same layout on both is key. I couldn't use Qwerty on the regular keyboard any more.

[@lpanebr]

@BenVallack yes, but the finger positions and muscle memory does not translate from the 36 ortholinear to a regular keyboard. Well, at least for me it doesn't. 😂😂

[@blakenator123]

aww no home row mods? That's why I can't stand using my laptop keyboard as I'm too dependent on the home row mods for command etc.

[@BenVallack]

Yeah as far as I can tell Karabiner can't deal with the 'tap-preferred' approach needed for home row mods.

[@nguyenhoangminhtrung2779]

a rice video with dotfiles next maybe?

[@jammies701]

Karabiner misspelled in description . Graphite link broken in description (needs a following `/`?)

[@BenVallack]

Fixed cheers!

[@christianbeuschel1297]

Boy do I hate the automatic translation feature of YT. It replaces the voice of the creator with an AI generated voice that speaks an AI generated translation in my native language. The video therefore sounds and feels like one of those AI scam videos or AI generated low effort click bait bs videos. The translation is faulty and you never know what the creator really said. I'm convinced the main goal for YT is to get people used to AI generated content and reduce the bond between creator and audience. But the feature is sold as "increase your audience" and "reach more people". Audience listening to the AI translation isn't your audience any more. All that is you gets lost in translation.

[@lpanebr]

It started to me in this video. I know how to change the audio track, but I haven't found how to disable it! It drives me crazy.

[@BenVallack]

Wow sounds like this could be super annoying. I will disable it I think!

[@sillybearhours]

chatgpt horseshit comes for us all i guess

[@sillybearhours]

God forbid you write 2 sentences 😭

[@KevinKipp3]

Big fan of the Meh key on a laptop. I've got my capslock key as Meh, which allows combining with left ⌘ for Hyper. Awesome stuff. Also, love the new format - glad you're prioritizing your family/wellbeing and sustainability!

[@BenVallack]

Thanks so much!

[@ArchitecTJ37]

First!! Dang it!!

[@JackFate76]

Nobody needs this.