Back in 2013 I wrote about my favourite productivity boost in Emacs, namely remapping Return to Control, which in combination with the classic remapping of CapsLock to Control makes it really easy to get a grip on Emacs’s obsession with the Control key.

In the original article I suggested to OS X (now macOS) users the tool KeyRemap4MacBook, which was eventually renamed to Karabiner. Unfortunately this tool stopped working in macOS Sierra, due to some internal kernel architecture changes.

That was pretty painful for me as it meant that on my old MacBook I couldn’t upgrade to the newest macOS editions and on my new MacBook I couldn’t type properly in Emacs (as it came with Sierra pre-installed)… Bummer!

Fortunately 2 years later this is finally solved - the Karabiner team rewrote Karabiner from scratch for newer macOS releases and recently added my dream feature to the new Karabiner Elements. Unlike in the past though, this remapping is not actually bundled with Karabiner by default, so you have to download and enable it manually from here.

That’s actually even better than what I had originally suggested, as here it’s also suggested to use CapsLock with a dual purpose as well - Control when held down and Escape otherwise. I have no idea how this never came to my mind, but it’s truly epic! A crazy productivity boost just got even crazier!

Enjoy!