Adding More Keys For More Mac Shortcuts

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use a cheap external keypad, like this one, to add extra keys to set up as keyboard shortcuts. 

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Now if you use keyboard shortcuts a lot on your Mac you may find that you've run out of keys. You've assigned things to all of the F keys. You've used different keyboard combinations like Command Option Shift Control and different letters. You've got so many that you can't even remember them all. So it would be great to have some extra keys.

For instance, here's a popular one that gives you a lot of different buttons and you can even have different things shown on each button. This is really handy and it's a great pro solution. A lot of people love this product. But it can be a little bit expensive. You can also use something like a cheap little keypad like this that is just meant to add a keypad to your Mac, like if you had a MacBook so you don't have the keypad on the right side of the keyboard you can use this and quickly enter in numbers if you do a lot of accounting work and such. But you can also assign different keyboard shortcuts to these keys. In fact if you've got the Apple Extended Keyboard, like I do, you've got a keypad on the right side here that you can use as well. You can use these for keyboard shortcuts.

But the native functionality is kind of limited in what you can do. For instance, let's go into System Settings here and I'm going to go to the Keyboard section and then Keyboard Shortcuts. Now under Launchpad & Dock I've got this really simple one I can use as an example, Show Launchpad. It's turned on but there is nothing assigned to it. So I can select it here and assign something like, say, Options Space, something like that. But I can also assign a key on the extended keypad here on my Extended Keyboard or I can do it using this keypad here. They are both mapped to the same thing. Pressing 5 on one is just like pressing 5 on the other.

So I can click here to set a key. I can press the 5 on this and now it is set to 5. Now I find that if I press 5 it brings up Launchpad. So just with the built-in functionality of System Settings I can already assign things to this. But you're limited on what you can do here in System Settings because if you go to some other areas, like let's go to Services and then Shortcuts. I can do so many things with shortcuts I create in the Shortcuts App. I've got on here that just launches the Calculator App. You can make something that launches anything, right? It would be great to assign a key on here to run this shortcut which then launches Calculator, or Keynote, or something. But if I try that, so I'll double-click here and press 5 you'll find that it doesn't work. It will set there. But 5 won't launch Calculator. Why? Because this kind of shortcut needs a Modifier Key. I have to hold the Command Key down on my main keyboard and press 5 here and now if I press Done here and I use Command 5 it will, in fact, launch Calculator. Unfortunately it also launches if I use Command and then the 5 key over the letters on my keyboard. So it is not differentiating between the two different 5 keys. What I would like to do is just have the number 5 on the Numeric Keypad, that should run the shortcut and do whatever I need.

So to accomplish this you're going to need to use one of two different popular apps. One is Keyboard Maestro, which is an app I personally use and love and use it for all sorts of different things. You could very easily assign a key on a specific device, like this keypad, to do some sort of shortcut, launch an app, do all sorts of things. You don't even need to use the Shortcuts App for most things. But you can have it run a shortcut. Keyboard Maestro is a pro app and it does cost something. So if you're looking for a free solution then Karabiner-Elements, which you can get here. This is something that you can add to your Mac and this is an app that a lot of people use. You can assign a keyboard key to do something special. But it takes a little bit more work.

So installing Karabiner-Elements is a lot of steps. Make sure you follow all of those closely or it won't work. Now once you have it installed and working you can go and create your own Custom Keyboard Shortcuts by going to Settings in Karabiner-Elements here. The first thing you want to do is go to Devices. In Devices you should see any keyboards you have connected. So I've got my Magic Keyboard, my regular keyboard, and I've got the little Bluetooth Keypad here and you want to note to the Vendor ID and the Product ID. You'll need the two of these because you want to say that you want, say, the 5 key on this keypad to do something. Not the 5 key on your regular keyboard. Now you can do simple modifications. So you can go here in Simple Modifications go to that specific device and then you can set one up.

I'll set one up here that, say, it is a keypad key and let's say the number 5 and what we'll have it do. There's a ton of different things you can have it do. You can't have it do just anything. You can't have it launch, say, a shortcut or just launch an app, or do all sorts of things like that. You have to assign something specific to it. Most of these are for mapping it to something else. Like I can map the keypad 5 to the F2 key or to the Spotlight feature key on the top of the keyboard to launch Spotlight. I can have it do all sorts of things. Here's launching Launchpad, for instance. If I set that up, and that's pretty easy. I can now press 5 and it will launch Launchpad. So that's really cool. There are a lot of different things that you can do in here. A lot of cool functions. A lot of things specific to different apps and all sorts of other things.

But if you want it to do just about anything you need to either write a ShellScript or a shortcut. For that you're going to need a Complex Modification. So, here you can add a predefined rule. They just give you a few here. But you can click here and actually go to all of these rules that other people have written and submitted to their website. Or, you can add your own rule. When you do you actually have to code it. If you're a coder this is pretty easy to do. It's easy to actually see all the stuff here. But if you're not a coder it can look pretty messy. I'm going to get rid of the example here and show you mine. What it is doing here is It has a Name, Keypad 1 to Roll die, because what I'm going to do is run a shortcut called Roll Die. It's a very simple shortcut that I have here in the Shortcuts App and all it's doing is getting a random number between one and six and showing it in an alert. That's all it is doing. The way this is formatted you have to include all of this different stuff here and you can see the parts in here that are important. There's a Condition and the condition is that the device has to be something specific. It's go to match a product ID and a vendor ID. Remember we looked at those numbers before. They match this. Main keyboard, and then it's going to look for Keypad underscore 1 which is the one key on that keypad. Then what's it going to do. Well, it's going to run a Shell Command. The Shell Command is just the way to run shortcuts in Terminal. Just Shortcuts Run. Then in single quotes the name of the shortcut. I've got double-quotes around the whole thing which is why I need to use single quotes here. The type here is just a basic Press the Key it does something. All of this has to be typed exactly.

So you've got to have all these brackets balances. All these curly brackets balanced. All of that so it is very difficult to do if you're not a coder. If you click Save and everything isn't perfect it's going to give you an Error message there. It can be very frustrating if you don't do this type of coding. But I've got it all in there and it's working. Now let's test it. I should be able to press the 1 key on here and it should roll the die. You can see there it runs the shortcut and gives me the number. Anytime I want have that do it. You can set this all up with all these different functions giving you all these extra keyboard shortcuts that are single key press keyboard shortcuts. Or if you like you could actually use these keys here in conjunction with Command and the key. So I can have 5 be one thing and Command 5 be something else. Having an extended keyboard with a keypad on it or having a little stand alone keypad like this in conjunction with an app like Karabiner-Elements or Keyboard Maestro can allow you have a lot more keyboard shortcuts that are easy to access. 

So I hope you found this useful Thanks for watching.