Making Extra Keys On Your Mac Actually Useful

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Chances are you have a few keys on your keyboard that you rarely ever use. You can reassign these keys to be more useful.

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So I don't know about you but I don't use the Shift key on both sides of my keyboard. I usually use it only on the left. The same thing with the Option key. Although I do find I use the Command key on both sides of the spacebar. But this leads my Shift and Option key on my right side of the keyboard unused. I also don't use my Caps Lock key. So it turns out there's a way to assign these keys to something else. You don't have to install any third party software or hack your Mac in any way. There's a couple things built into the system.

So if you go to System Preferences and then to Keyboard you've got Shortcuts and here's where you can assign and create keyboard shortcuts. The problem is you can't just add a modifier key like Shift, Option, Command, or Control as a key by itself. It has to be a combination. So Command and then a letter for instance. So none of these will actually work to reassign the actual Shift key and the Option key on the right side of my keyboard to anything. You can't use Caps Lock either. So this isn't the place to be able to set these.

But if you go into Mission Control you've got some special keyboard shortcuts listed here. Now you'll actually find these items back where we just were in the Keyboard Shortcuts. You can assign things like Command F1 to them.  But here you can assign some things you can't normally assign as keyboard shortcuts. They are the Shift, Control, Option, and Command keys on either the left or right side.

So, for instance, I can change Mission Control instead of being Control and up arrow, I can change it to the right Shift key. Now when I press the right Shift key it goes to Mission Control. As a matter of fact it even works like the Shift key because I can hold it down and then release it and it goes back. If ever you want to go back to the default it's always the one at the top here. You can do the same thing with Application windows. You can choose one of these. So I can do right Option with this as well. The Desktop also allows this. So Dashboard doesn't but dashboard is going away in Catalina anyway.

Note that another option here is the fn key. That's a little bit too useful for lots of different things so I would never assign that as a keyboard shortcut. But it's there as an option if you want it. That's how you can make those unused modifier keys actually useful. But how about the Caps Lock key. Well if you go into Keyboard again but instead of Shortcuts go to the Keyboard Screen and there's a button for Modifier Keys. Click that and it allows you to change the modifier keys. So, for instance, if you really wanted the Control to be Command and Command to be Control you can do that. I don't recommend doing that! It's very confusing. 

But Caps Lock is also included here. So you can change Caps Lock to actually be one of these. So I can make the Caps Lock an extra Control key or Option key or Command key. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. The two settings that are most interesting are Escape. So you can actually use the Caps Lock key as an Escape key. This is very useful on MacBooks that have the TouchBar because the Escape key is part of the TouchBar. But if you prefer a physical key for Escape then you can assign that to the Caps Lock key.

You can also go to No Action. A lot of people use this to prevent them from accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key. How many of us have tried to enter a password unsuccessfully only to realize that you accidentally had the Caps Lock key down. This would stop that.

Now if you do want to hack your Mac to actually use those keys for something completely different there is a way to do it by installing a third party app. It's called Karabiner. It's been around for awhile and it's fairly geeky. But if you're into that kind of thing you can install this, play around with the settings, read some tutorials on how to use it, and get the Caps Lock key to be, say, something completely different.