This article shows how to set up better shortcuts for common actions and provides some clever macros for programmers.
Before you start making shortcuts, you need to know your modifier key options: Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Super (or whatever), Hyper, and Meta. The last two are useful because shortcuts that use more common modifiers like Ctrl can run into conflicts with established shortcuts.
Oh, your keyboard doesn’t have Hyper or Meta? Wow, lame.
Okay, just remap Caps Lock to Hyper (for Linux users, use Gnome Tweaks). The keyboard shortcuts below assume that you have done so. They wouldn’t make ergonomic sense otherwise. You can consider remapping something to Meta as well, but Hyper should be enough.
I also suggest swapping Left Alt and Left Super (Gnome Tweaks can do this too) because Alt is a closer reach from normal resting keyboard position. The easier shortcuts are to reach from this position, the more valuable they are. This is why I suggest replacing hard-to-reach shortcuts for common actions like copy and paste with faster more ergonomic alternatives. Left-handed shortcuts are also more valuable because your right hand might be using the mouse.
You can find the code for the following keyboard shortcuts (along with others) at my Github repo. The code is built for use with AutoKey for Linux only.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Effect |
| Hyper + A | Jump to beginning of line |
| Hyper + S | Jump to end of line |
| Hyper + W | Single tap: copy highlighted text, double tap: highlight word and copy, triple tap: highlight entire line and copy |
| Hyper + E | Paste |
| Hyper + F | Find |
| Hyper + G | Next item in find |
| Hyper + D | Highlight and copy URL in browser |
| Hyper + Q | Backpage in browser |
| Hyper + ‘ | Esc |
| Hyper + J | K | L | ; | Move cursor left | down | up | right |
| Super + J | ; | Switch tabs left | right |
| Super + K | L | Move up | down workspace |
| Super + S | Save |
| Super + Z | Undo |
| Super + Backspace | Delete line |
| Super + W | Single tap: open new tab, double tap: open new window |
| Super + Q | Single tap: close tab, double tap: close window |
Macros
Macros replace sequences with other sequences. For instance, when I type ‘/em’, Autokey automatically replaces it with my email address.
As a programmer, I type these characters often: +=_(){}. They are hard to type, so I created macros that generate them from double letter sequences that are rare in English:
| Phrase | Replacement |
| jj | () |
| kk | = |
| uu | _ |
| ii | {} |
| ;; | : |
| hh | + |
| /em | Email address |
| /cl | console.log |