EmojiBoard for Mac

Finally your caps-lock key can be useful 🎉 🎉 🎉! Turn it into an keyboard modifier that makes every key you type an emoji 🙂, and watch the hours of time saved pile up 📈💰💪.

🎵: this also has the desirable side-effect of making it harder to auto-caps-lock by accident 🚫

Instructions

Part one: emoji keybindings

1️⃣ Open Terminal.app, type mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings/ and hit enter

2️⃣ Put the file DefaultKeyBinding.dict into ~/Library/KeyBindings/ 🎵: ~/Library/ is a hidden folder that won't show up in Finder, but you can make it visible by typing command + shift + . at the same time

3️⃣ IMPORTANT: Reload an application for these key bindings to take effect

And voila! You should now be able to type emojis by holding down shift + option + control and typing any key

The current keyboard–emoji mapping is largely stolen from @MattDzugan, then lightly optimized for my personal usage (read into that what you like) and what I can more-or-less easily remember, but you can edit the contents of DefaultKeyBinding.dict to be whatever you like 🙌! A few tips when doing this:

🅰️ To insert different emojis into DefaultKeyBinding.dict, type command + control + space_bar to bring up the MacOS emoji picker

🅱️ Remember to reload any applications that are open in order for changes to DefaultKeyBinding.dict to take effect

Part two: mapping caps_lock to shift + option + control

1️⃣ Follow this post, excluding the section titled A True Hyper Key (we'll map to emojis instead!). Like the author, I use the method where shift + caps_lock maps to caps_lock.

2️⃣ In ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json there should be a few lines resembling:

"to": [
    {
        "key_code": "left_shift",
        "modifiers": [
            "left_command",
            "left_control",
            "left_option"
        ]
    }
],

Delete the line containing "left_command", and you're done!

FAQ

Why is part two so janky?

😬 good point. That's how I did it, but I should probably figure out how to contribute to karabiner so that ppl don't have to edit karabiner.json by hand but for now that's the way to do it. Pls feel free to contribute that and let me know so I can get rid of this mea culpa!

Why do you have an FAQ instead of just putting these all in Issues

Ok apparently I am better at MacOS keyboard hacks than at using github correctly 🙃

Why use shift + option + control instead of command + shift + option + control?

Weird things were happening with the latter, e.g., commands actually executing, so I decided to stick with the former that I found to generally be mapped to nothing.

Why aren't you utilizing the F keys?

I did this on a macbook with touch bar. Feel free to add F-key mappings to DefaultKeyBinding.dict for your own personal usage.

References

• I 💯% stole the idea for this project from @MattDzugan
• I learned to edit default key bindings using this gist
• I learned about how to correctly format DefaultKeyBinding.dict on this page (thank heavens for the waybackmachine)
• I learned about karabiner-elements from this post