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Navigation, Deletion, and Mouse

Move and select text, delete by semantic unit, and control the pointer or wheel without leaving the keyboard.

The pink and brown areas around the home row carry CapsLock Enhancement’s most frequent operations. The navigation and deletion families together carry 114 of the 282 mappings in V3.1 — this is the part of the layout worth learning first.

Important

Unless stated otherwise, every chord on this page assumes Hyper is held. “+ ” therefore means with plus the listed key.

H J K L move left, down, up, and right, exactly as in Vim. Directly above them, U I O P extend the same idea to whole pages and lines: Page Up, Home, End, Page Down.

Those eight keys are the only ones mapped on nine different planes. Each group of planes below covers one job, and together they account for 72 of the 282 mappings in V3.1.

Moving and selecting text

The text layer follows one rule: hold and a movement becomes a selection, because the rule emits the same arrow key with added. Adding on top widens the unit — a character becomes a word, a line becomes three lines, half a line becomes the whole line.

Planes 0, 1 and 3 — move, select, select more
Key Hyper + + with
H Left Select left Select word left
J Down Select line down Select three lines down
K Up Select line up Select three lines up
L Right Select right Select word right
U Page Up Select page up Select page up
I Home Select to line start Select the line, end to start
O End Select to line end Select the line, start to end
P Page Down Select page down Select page down

That is why with with with I jumps to the end of the line and then selects back to its start: it is the fastest way to grab exactly one line without touching the mouse.

Switching apps, windows, tabs and desktops

moves between containers — the thing you are looking at rather than the text inside it — while talks to the window server.

What the ⇧ and ⌃ columns actually send
Chord Emits Effect
with with J / with with K with / with with Next / previous application
with with H / with with L with with / with Previous / next tab
with with I / with with O with with ` / with ` Previous / next window of the same app
with with U / with with P with with - / with with = Zoom out / in
with with H / with with L with / with Previous / next desktop
with with K / with with O with Mission Control
with with J with Application windows of the focused app
with with I with H Hide the current app
with with U with with F Toggle full screen
with with P with Spotlight
Note

Tab switching relies on with , which most browsers and editors honour but a few apps do not. Window cycling uses with `, the standard macOS “move focus to next window” shortcut — confirm it is enabled under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts….

Pointer and wheel from the home row

Four more planes turn the same eight keys into a mouse, without your hands moving at all. is the accelerator in both modes.

Planes 2, 10, 12 and 9 — the two fast planes double the speed of the plane beside them
Key +
Pointer
+ with
Pointer, fast
+ with
Wheel
+ with
Wheel, fast
H Pointer left Pointer left Wheel left Wheel left
J Pointer down Pointer down Wheel down Wheel down
K Pointer up Pointer up Wheel up Wheel up
L Pointer right Pointer right Wheel right Wheel right
U Left button Left button Wheel right Wheel right
I Right button Right button Wheel up Wheel up
O Back button Back button Wheel down Wheel down
P Forward button Forward button Wheel left Wheel left
Speed is Karabiner's mouse_key unit, not pixels
Plane Pointer speed Wheel speed
/ with 1600 64
with / with 3200 128

The middle mouse button is the one exception: it lives on with with rather than on a navigator key.

Arrow-key mouse control

The physical arrow keys drive the pointer too, which is often quicker than reaching for the home-row layer. Here slows down and speeds up, in both pointer and wheel modes.

Three pointer speeds and three wheel speeds on the arrow cluster
Chord Result Speed
+ arrows Move the pointer 1600
with + arrows Move slowly 800
with + arrows Move quickly 4200
with + arrows Scroll the wheel 64
with with + arrows Scroll slowly 32
with with + arrows Scroll quickly 256

All five mouse buttons sit on :

Chord Button
with Left click
with with Right click
with with Middle click
with with Back
with with Forward

Semantic deletion

N M , . sit directly below the navigation keys. The pair on the left deletes backwards, the pair on the right deletes forwards, and the unit grows as you add modifiers.

N and M delete backwards from the cursor, comma and period forwards
Key Hyper + +
N Delete the previous word Delete back to the line start Delete back to the line start
M Delete the previous character Delete the previous word Move the line down
, Delete the next character Delete the next word Move the line up
. Delete the next word Delete forward to the line end Delete back to the line start

Two rows break the pattern deliberately. with with N and with with . both send with , clearing everything from the cursor back to the start of the line, so the outer keys of the block are the “throw this line away” pair. And with with M / with with , do not delete at all: they emit with with and with with , the move-line-down/up shortcut that IntelliJ, VS Code and most editors share.

Numeric keypad as a mouse

If your keyboard has a keypad, Hyper turns the whole block into a mouse. The digits give eight directions around a neutral 5; the top row scrolls; the bottom and right edges are the five buttons.

Hyper plus the keypad: pointer, wheel, and all five buttons
Keypad keys Mapping
7 8 9 4 6 1 2 3 Eight pointer directions, including the diagonals
5 Stop — sends a zero-velocity pointer event
/ = Wheel up / down
Num Lock * Wheel sideways
0 Left click
. Middle click
Right click
+ / - Forward / back

The same speed modifiers apply as everywhere else: slows the pointer to roughly half, doubles it, and adding converts pointer motion into wheel motion at the matching speed.

Next

Continue with windows, applications, terminal controls, clipboards, and symbols.