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My Config

I have customised my Mac to make it enjoyable for keyboard-centric use, with one small monitor (or just the laptop), and I like to use free and open source software. Here is an overview of my configuration to date.

Key bindings

When I moved from Windows to Mac, I didn't like the awkward positioning of the CTRL and CMD keys, and had thumb pain within weeks. I have since heavily rebound my keyboard and I have honed in on an efficient and comfortable layout for development, window management, and general use.

Main rebinds:

CAPS LOCK → CMD if held, ESCAPE if alone
- This is my favourite rebind. CMD is used all across macOS: opening and closing tabs, switching tabs my number, copying and pasting, and so on. This puts CMD right under my pinky, making the key fast and unmissable.
- This keybinding is also extremely useful for quickly correcting mistakes while touch typing, because CMD+BACKSPACE to delete the previous word is near instantaneous, and deleting the entire previous mistyped word and retyping it is faster than trying to backspace the correct number of times.
- I can hold CAPS LOCK and comfortably hit any other key with either hand.
- I trigger CAPS LOCK with LEFT SHIFT + RIGHT SHIFT. This is a little awkward but I almost always hold shift instead.
- This rebind also makes ESCAPE very acessible for leaving insert mode in vim.
Swap CMD + ARROW KEYS with OPTION + ARROW KEYS
- This makes hopping between words easy with CAPS LOCK + ARROWS.
RETURN → CTRL if held, RETURN if alone
- CTRL is used a lot in terminal programs on Mac.
- This rebind is only comfortable when I am performing CTRL with my right hand and the rest of the combo with my left hand e.g. CTRL+C/D, otherwise I use the normal CTRL key.
CMD → HYPER 1 if held, CMD+SHIFT → HYPER 2
- Both CMD keys are remapped to 'HYPER 1' which I use to switch between windows e.g. 'HYPER 1' + 1 switches to workspace 1.
- I move an application to a specific workspace with CMD+SHIFT e.g. 'HYPER 2' + 7 moves the focussed app to workspace 7.
CMD → ALT+TAB if pressed alone for quickly switching between two workspaces.

Window management

Aerospace is a powerful, free and open source window manager for MacOS. It is aimed at advanced, keyboard centric users and fully configurable with a dot-file (here's mine). A few notes about my Aerospace config:

I use dedicated, named workspaces for my most frequently used singleton applications. For example, my browser, ChatGPT, and Zotero are on dedicated workspaces.
My projects live on numbered workspaces which I reconfigure frequently depending on what I'm working on. I also use numbered workspaces for anything that doesn't have a dedicated workspace.

Great software

(All FOSS)

Helium: an excellent Chromium fork.
Ghostty: a Mac-first hardware accelerated terminal emulator with optimal defaults.
Zotero: for storing & annotating research documents.
Neovim: build your own custom text editor.
Zed: a Mac-first hardware accelerated code editor with excellent defaults.
Karabiner-Elements: for rebindings keys.

And Obsidian (not FOSS).

Great browser extensions

uBlock Origin: the
Google Scholar PDF Reader: the best PDF reader (but I store and annotate in Zotero).
Quick Tab Switch: like alt+tab for Chrome tabs.
Zotero Connector: save papers
DeArrow: remove clickbait from YouTube
Remove YouTube Shorts: DWISOTT
SponsorBlock: skip in-video YouTube ads.
Unhook: minimalise the YouTube UI (disable recommended videos, comments)

Updated 05/12/25