KeyBinding madness

There’s a somewhat mysterious individual who is consistently leaving brilliant little pieces of code and information in my comments. Dr. Drang has been visited by this apparition as well. We’re both duly impressed with what he (or she?) does.

So, I’m digging through the code Lri’s posted and I find a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file. It’s the best one I’ve ever seen, and it inspires me to do some “fiddling” of my own. I figured I’d post my result, but with due credit to Lri (hi, Lri!).

The DefaultKeyBinding.dict file tells your computer at a fairly root level how to handle keyboard shortcuts in input fields. It doesn’t work everywhere, but sometimes it’s surprising where it does work. In those cases, you can save yourself a ton of time by committing a few custom keystrokes to memory.

You may be familiar with the basic Emacs keybindings that are default (Ctrl-a beginning of line, Ctrl-e end of line, etc.), but this allows you to go much further. For more information, check out Macworld hints, an older but very relevant article from Harvard and do a search for more information.

Basically, all you need to do is put the DefaultKeyBinding.dict file into ~/Library/KeyBindings and restart applications you want it to work in. Edit away, and change shortcuts to things you’re comfortable with. Several of mine are sequences which allow groupings, which I like, but you might not. Be aware that these can be a little unpredictable as to when they’ll override a system/application default and when they’ll be overridden (I know there’s a logic to it, I just don’t want to dive into that).

I’ve posted my KeyBindings on GitHub and included a cheatsheet in MultiMarkdown as well as a Readme with the tables already rendered. Direct download link below. If you’re looking for something to nerd out on this weekend, this should whet your appetite.

Just for reference, here’s the table of shortcuts in the KeyBindings file:

Grouped items begin with the groups shortcut, followed by the Keys specified. Items separated by commas are sequential, not concurrent.