Wednesday, September 21, 2016

MacOS 10.12 sierra karibiner and seil are broken

After updating to macos sierra it seems seil and karabiner do not work any more. From the official site it looks like it will take a while before the replacement app karabiner-elements is ready for prime time.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

1) Start Karibiner and take a screen shot of your current settings. Check off 'Show enabled only'

2) Uninstall seil and karabiner.

I found that macos would not shut down cleanly after this step. Like it was failing on closing a process and hanged. Seems to have went away after installing karabiner-elements.

3) Install karabiner-elements and create the file ~/.karabiner.d/configuration/karabiner.json

https://pqrs.org/latest/karabiner-elements-latest.dmg (mentioned in the above github README.md)

4) To get back my settings I added the following remaps.

  {
      "profiles": [
          {
              "name": "Default profile",
              "selected": true,
              "simple_modifications": {
                  "caps_lock": "escape",
                  "left_command": "left_option",
                  "left_option": "fn",
                  "fn": "left_command"
              }
          }
      ]
  } 

5) To get the names of keys to add to the above, you can't really use the karabiner event viewer app. I was seeing Command_L and Fn. The following file has a list of all the acceptable names. control-f for left_command and you can see other ones that might suit your needs.

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/src/share/types.hpp

Hope this helps.