7

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, from Leopard and I was using an awesome app called Spark that let you remap your keys, set scripts/macros and even had repeat functionality.

However, this app doesn't seem to be in active development anymore, and 10.6 broke the ability to bind certain modifier keys (Shift) with other keys.

I totally miss things like Shift+Insert for paste (Linux/Windows), setting Ctrl+Shift+Esc for Activity Monitor, and Ctrl+Alt+Del for the login window.

So, how can I achieve this instead?

slhck
  • 235,242
Jack Chu
  • 517

3 Answers3

6

Karabiner meets your needs. You can actually recompile (now just configure) to add more mappings to it, if you need. (Also, it's not just for MacBooks.)

alper
  • 200
wfaulk
  • 6,307
5

In Snow Leopard, Automator allows you to create Services, for which you can then assign a keyboard shortcut. So, if you can mimic the task in some Apple Script, then that might be an option. Like: bind Command-L to Fast User Switching.

To start programs like Activity Monitor there's a built-in action "Launch Application". For other tasks, rather than "Run Shell Script" as used in the example above, you probably need "Run AppleScript". Like to paste just anything:

on run {input, parameters}
  tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "v" using command down
  end tell
  return input
end run

I am no AppleScript expert so the above can probably be improved. (However, I think the built-in action "Get Contents of Clipboard" cannot be used to actually paste anything, and even it could then it would be limited to just text.)

Community
  • 1
Arjan
  • 31,511
3

FastScripts is a good alternative. Keyboard Maestro is much more powerful (and expensive).

user479534
  • 4,931