Remapping Semicolon to Backspace
A few weeks ago I went on a key rebinding spree, and tried to improve my efficiency by moving around keys I use most. I’ve had capslock bound to escape for nearly 2 years now and I can’t recommend it enough.
There are two tools by the same guy. They’re both kind of minimal, but work well enough:
- PCKeyboardHack for rebinding capslock
- KeyRemap4MacBook for rebinding just about anything else
Anyway, I hit the backspace key a lot. Probably more than I should. So I wanted to move it to nearer the home row. Also, being a Ruby programmer, I hardly ever use semicolon. So I rebound semicolon to backspace, and right-shift to semicolon.
KeyRemap4Macbook doesn’t let you do it out of the box, but it lets you add in custom rebindings with a file called
private.xml under the Misc & Uninstall
Here’s the contents of mine, if anyone’s interested.
Update: Shift-semicolon now does delete too.
I also tried flipping 1234… to being !@#$… by default, and 1234… requiring shift. I thought I used those symbols much more in programming than the numbers, but I found it a lot harder to get used to than I thought, and I changed back.
