Setting up the Macintosh keyboard
Table of Contents
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1. Overview
MacOS comes with a variety of keyboard shortcuts installed for you automatically, but you may not realize that they are there—or how convenient they can be! For those of us raised on EMACS, they are so thoroughly embedded in our fingers that it is difficult to adjust to computers and operating systems that lack them. What's more, you can create key sequences that allow you to quickly type Greek or other letters without having to switch keyboard layouts.
2. Modifier keys
It strains my finger to use the control key where it is on current Mac keyboards, and I basically never have any use for caps lock. So, I make the caps lock key another control key using System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys. As you'll see below, the control key is extremely convenient for navigation on a Mac (which is why I find it difficult to adjust to applications in X and Windows, which use the control key to fire menu commands, for which the Mac uses the command key).
3. Built-in navigation keys
Before computer keyboards were outfitted with wonderful innovations like arrow keys, we still had to move around the screen. Even on keyboards with arrow keys, it can be awkward to strike those keys without looking for them because they usually live in inconvenient places compared to the home row. Two main solutions emerged: the vi(m) solution and the emacs solution.
3.1. VI and VIM
VI (VIsual editor) used a key to toggle between editing mode, in which letters produced text, and command/navigation mode, in which letters launched a variety of editing operations, such as moving the cursor up, down, left, or right. (In VI, j and k go left and right, while h and l go up and down. Not very mnemonic, but definitely clustered.)
3.2. EMACS
EMACS (Editor MACroS) was created by Richard Stallman in 1976 and based on a different trick to allow letters to play multiple roles. Instead, one uses modifier keys to modify the meaning of a letter, which is essentially an extension of the shift key (which modifies lowercase letters to give uppercase versions, and changes numbers into various symbols). The primary modifier key is the control key, which (importantly) was often located where the caps lock key is found these days. Which means to say, it was in a very convenient location to be pressed with the left pinky to modify the meaning of the letter key to be pressed. Stallman sought to use letters with sensible hints to their meaning (at least for English speakers). Hence, the following list of control keys (which is just a subset of the available.
| keystroke | meaning |
|---|---|
| ^f | forward one character (i.e., right arrow) |
| ^b | back one character (left arrow) |
| ^n | next line (down arrow) |
| ^p | previous line (up arrow) |
| ^a | beginning of the line (like beginning of the alphabet) |
| ^e | end of the line |
| ^t | transpose (swap the characters on either side of the cursor) |
| ^k | kill (delete from the cursor) to the end of the line |
4. Accessing Greek unicode characters
You can create key sequences to type Greek letters. I use the prefix ^g
followed by the corresponding letter: a for alpha, b for beta, etc. The mapping
is defined in a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict which gets stored in the
directory ~/Library/KeyBindings/. Create a text file with the name
DefaultKeyBinding.dict and enter the following text, then save the file in the
KeyBindings directory. Applications that are open at the time you save this
file will not notice the changes, but any application you open once the file is
saved should adopt the added bindings.
/* Greek unicode letters */
"^g" = {
"a" = ("insertText:", "\U03B1");
"b" = ("insertText:", "\U03B2");
"g" = ("insertText:", "\U03B3");
"d" = ("insertText:", "\U03B4");
"e" = ("insertText:", "\U03B5");
"z" = ("insertText:", "\U03B6");
"h" = ("insertText:", "\U03B7");
"q" = ("insertText:", "\U03B8");
"k" = ("insertText:", "\U03BA");
"l" = ("insertText:", "\U03BB");
"m" = ("insertText:", "\U03BC");
"n" = ("insertText:", "\U03BD");
"x" = ("insertText:", "\U03BE");
"p" = ("insertText:", "\U03C0");
"r" = ("insertText:", "\U03C1");
"s" = ("insertText:", "\U03C3");
"t" = ("insertText:", "\U03C4");
"u" = ("insertText:", "\U03C5");
"c" = ("insertText:", "\U03C7");
"y" = ("insertText:", "\U03C8");
"w" = ("insertText:", "\U03C9");
"f" = ("insertText:", "\U03D5");
"F" = ("insertText:", "\U03C6");
"G" = ("insertText:", "\U0393");
"D" = ("insertText:", "\U0394");
"P" = ("insertText:", "\U03A0");
"Q" = ("insertText:", "\U0398");
"S" = ("insertText:", "\U03A3");
"W" = ("insertText:", "\U03A9");
"X" = ("insertText:", "\U039E");
};