CapsLock Enhancement · V3.1 · Karabiner-Elements
Tap it for Escape. Hold it for Hyper.
One forgotten key becomes sixteen keyboard control planes.
Apache-2.0 · no background service of its own · nothing to buy
Why one key is enough
The most reachable key on the board does nothing. Here is what it does instead.
01 / THE CORE IDEA
◇ One key, two unambiguous jobs
Esc, back within reach✱ Esc still toggles the original Caps Lock✱ Space still switches the input sourceNothing is lost. Everything moves closer.
02 / ADDRESSABLE SPACE
◇ Four modifiers, four bits, sixteen planes
⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ⇧ are four binary switchesThe keyboard stops being a surface and becomes an address space.
# plane = left ⌘⌥⌃⇧ read as four bits
✱ plane 0 89 mappings
✱⌘ plane 1 59 mappings
✱⌥ plane 2 38 mappings
✱⇧ plane 8 25 mappings
✱⌘⇧ plane 9 21 mappings
✱⌥⇧ plane 10 21 mappings
# 9 planes in use, 7 still yours
03 / CONFIGURATION AS DATA
◇ One JSON file, no hidden state
capslock.yml, run one makeInspect first. Customize with confidence.
What the planes hold
The physical keyboard is colour-coded by purpose, so a key’s neighbourhood tells you what it does. Counts below are the mappings each family ships in V3.1.
HJKL moves, UIOP pages. Add modifiers to select text, switch tabs, windows, apps and desktops, or drive the pointer and wheel.
N M , . sit under the navigation keys and delete by character, word or line — forwards and backwards, without moving your hand.
The numeric keypad becomes a complete mouse — eight pointer directions, four wheel directions and five buttons, with slow and fast variants.
Close a tab, a window or an app; cycle apps, windows, tabs and desktops; sleep, lock or log out. Layout is handed to Moom or Magnet.
The yellow keys launch or focus the browser, terminal, editor, IDE and launcher. These are defaults, not requirements.
⌃C ⌃D ⌃Z ⌃R without contorting your left hand, plus Vim and Tmux prefixes and one key each for Codex and Claude.
Number keys 6–0 become five independent text clipboards. Hyper with ⌘ copies into a slot; Hyper alone pastes from it.
The punctuation a programmer types all day — brackets, braces, angle brackets, underscore, colon and bang — one chord away.
Media, brightness, keyboard light and volume on F1–F12, screenshots on the backtick and F13–F14, plus fine-grained steps on the navigation cluster.
Installation
A Karabiner-Elements rule set. Nothing else to install, nothing new in the background.
Download it from the official site, or use Homebrew. Grant the background services, Accessibility, Input Monitoring and Driver Extension permissions macOS asks for.
brew install --cask karabiner-elementsOpen this URL in any browser — it hands the configuration straight to Karabiner-Elements. Choose Import, then enable the rules you want under Complex Modifications.
karabiner://karabiner/assets/complex_modifications/import?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Vonng/Capslock/main/mac_v3/capslock.jsonFrom real users
Not marketing copy — two emails, in full, from people who put CapsLock Enhancement into their daily work.
I just wanted to reach out to a fellow dev and say thank you so much for all the hard work you put into your Capslock enhancements.
I was already using a hyper/escape key via karabiner elements and used it to hot-swap focus between apps as you have on a few of your keys.
But HOT DAMN you took it to a whole new level. This is amazing. I have printed out your reference image and have it hanging on my monitor.
I am slowly tweaking and customizing to make it fit my workflow. Thank you again and again for showing me a new way to think about my keyboard with multiple HYPER LAYERS!
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? — John Archibald Wheeler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 480 (1986)
Hello author:
I stumbled upon your git library today, downloaded it and tried it out:
github.com/Vonng/Capslock— and I am really impressed. This script made me really love my keyboard.I’m using a Filco 87 dual-mode keyboard just like you, and this script makes me feel like flying!
I’m just sending you an email to express my sincere thanks and hope you will continue to maintain it in the future.
Thanks again!
Thirteen years of one idea
The first CapsLock Enhancement turns the key into a modifier on Windows. Archived, but still in the repository.
Ported to the original Karabiner and its XML private configuration.
Rebuilt on Karabiner-Elements complex modifications. The sixteen control planes appear, and the project enters the official gallery.
The configuration becomes a readable YAML source compiled into Karabiner JSON, so mappings can be reviewed as data.
Five clipboards on 6–0, Codex and Claude on C, screenshots on F13 and F14, Spotlight and Alfred 5 defaults.
Before you install
No. Hyper plus ⎋ toggles the original Caps Lock state, and macOS still shows the indicator. In practice the state is needed a few times a month, while Escape is needed a few times a minute — which is the whole argument for the swap.
Yes. Hyper is not a private signal: it is ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ⇧ on the right side of the keyboard, held together. Alfred, Moom, Magnet, Raycast and your IDE receive a perfectly ordinary chord and can bind it like any other.
No. The configurator rewrites the applications behind the yellow keys in the browser and exports a new JSON file. For anything deeper, edit mac_v3/capslock.yml in a fork and regenerate the JSON.
No. The layout assumes an ANSI keyboard and works on built-in Apple keyboards and external ones alike. The numeric-keypad mouse layer needs a keypad; everything else does not.
The Windows AutoHotkey version is archived in the repository and no longer maintained. Linux is not supported: desktop environments differ too much for one configuration. A port with tools such as xmodmap would be welcome.
Nothing, and nothing. The rule set is Apache-2.0 licensed data interpreted by Karabiner-Elements; there is no account, no telemetry and no separate background process.
Make Caps Lock great again.Install Karabiner, import one JSON file, keep your hands on the home row.