Hyper Key in macOS Sierra with Karabiner Elements

Over the last few years, various people have used Karabiner to remap Caps Lock to cmd+shift+opt+ctrl, which is such an unusual combination of modifier keys, that it effectively makes Caps behave as a completely new modifier (which we have collectively called "Hyper", in reference to old UNIX workstation keyboards).

And for a time, it was good.

Then came macOS Sierra, which changed enough of the input layers of its kernel, that Karabiner was unable to function. Thankfully, Karabiner's author, Fumihiko Takayama, began work on a complete rewrite of Karabiner, which is currently called Karabiner Elements.

Initially, Elements only supported very simple keyboard modifications - you could swap one key for another, but that was it. Various folk quickly got to work offering quick hacks to get a Hyper key to work, and others started to try to work around the missing support, with other tools.

I'm very glad to say that it is now possible to do a proper Hyper remap with Karabiner Elements (and to be clear, none of this is my work, all credit goes to Fumihiko).

Here's how you can get it:

• Download and install https://pqrs.org/latest/karabiner-elements-latest.dmg
• Launch the Karabiner Elements app, go to the Misc tab and check which version you have, if it's less than 0.91.1, click either Check for updates or Check for beta updates until you get offered 0.91.1 or higher, then install that update and re-launch the Karabiner Elements app.
• You probably want to remove the example entry in the Simple Modifications tab.
• Edit ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json
• Find the simple_modifications section, and right after it, paste in:

"complex_modifications": {
    "rules": [
        {
            "manipulators": [
                {
                    "description": "Change caps_lock to command+control+option+shift.",
                    "from": {
                        "key_code": "caps_lock",
                        "modifiers": {
                            "optional": [
                                "any"
                            ]
                        }
                    },
                    "to": [
                        {
                            "key_code": "left_shift",
                            "modifiers": [
                                "left_command",
                                "left_control",
                                "left_option"
                            ]
                        }
                    ],
                    "type": "basic"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
},

• As soon as you save the file, Elements will notice it has changed, and reload its config. You should immediately have a working Hyper key 😁

If you're not confident at your ability to hand-merge JSON like this, and don't need anything from Elements other than the basic defaults, plus Hyper, feel free to grab my config and drop it in ~/.config/karabiner/.

Supplemental note for High Sierra

I've only tested this very briefly on High Sierra, but I had to disable SIP to get the Elements .kext to load. I'm not quite sure what's going on, but I reported it on GitHub. (Note that you can re-enable SIP after the kext has been loaded successfully once)

Update

Many people like to turn Caps into Hyper, but also have it behave as Escape if it is tapped on its own. As of Karabiner Elements 0.91.3 this appears to be possible by adding this to the manipulator:

"to_if_alone": [
    {
        "key_code": "escape",
        "modifiers": {
            "optional": [
                "any"
            ]
        }
    }
],

(thanks to Brett Terpstra for the sample of this