Recover Illuminate Keys, Keep DND Key

[Marvin Turner]

Hello,

With the M1 MacBook Air Apple made a crazy decision to replace the Lauchpad, Illuminate Down, and Illuminate Up special keys with Spotlight, Dictation, and DND. Spotlight is egregiously wasteful because the ⌘+Space shortcut is too easy. Likewise with Dictation because it is never going to be used, and it also had an easy shortcut (double fn). DND however can be handy during presentations and periods of 'Flow'.

I was looking into how to remap the keys when I found this reddit post. They managed to write a login script that maps the keyboard keys to F5 and F6. However I would like to map them to F4 and F5, keeping F6 as DND. No one seems to know the key code for F4.

I saw this app recommended several times to regain the old behavior. I like that it works to make F4 and F5 keyboard brightness keys, but DND is stripped from F6. Is there any way to keep DND at F6?

[covertop...@gmail.com]

You can use Karabiner-EventViewer to find key codes by pressing keys.

Karabiner-Elements has quite a performance cost though, for such a simple use case.

Perhaps you can make the change natively?

Also look into the Ukelele app, which can create keyboard maps that macOS natively supports, but might not work for f-keys.