stay on home row

I am sick of moving my hands to the mouse and arrow keys. This is my formula on Mac OS X for minimizing mouse usage while I’m working:

MacVim [1] — Modal editor or bust.

Spectacle [2] — moving windows with keyboard shortcuts.
I prefer vim-like Shift+Command+H/J/K/L for moving windows about.

Vimium [3] — Chromium extension for vim-like page navigation shortcuts.
The easymotion-esque link navigation is just brilliant. You can ‘click’ links, and complete complex forms without touching the mouse.

Seil and Karabiner [4,5] — Remap CAPSLOCK key and add custom keyboard shortcuts.
The final piece that makes it all complete is remapping the otherwise entirely unused and very conveniently located CAPSLOCK key to something useful.

I couldn’t get away from using the arrow keys at the command line to traverse the readline history or for selecting the correct URL in the browser autocomplete list.

So, I remapped the CAPSLOCK key to the right alt/option key, and configured a shortcut that maps CAPSLOCK+H/J/K/L to the arrow keys.

  <!-- ~/Library/Application Support/Karabiner/private.xml -->
  <item>
    <name>Capslock Vim Arrows</name>
    <appendix>Use capslock+HJKL as arrow keys.</appendix>
    <identifier>private.capslock_vim_arrows</identifier>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__ KeyCode::H, ModifierFlag::OPTION_R, KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT
    </autogen>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__ KeyCode::J, ModifierFlag::OPTION_R, KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN
    </autogen>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__ KeyCode::K, ModifierFlag::OPTION_R, KeyCode::CURSOR_UP
    </autogen>
    <autogen>
      __KeyToKey__ KeyCode::L, ModifierFlag::OPTION_R, KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT
    </autogen>
  </item>