Set up Karabiner Elements to mimick the Esc key on my 60% keyboard

[Michael Dixon]

I'm about to receive a new touchbar MacBook Pro, and I'm worried about the lack of physical Esc key. Karabiner Elements already has some great solutions built in to use Caps Lock or Control, but I'm trying to set up the grave/tilde key to mimick what it does on my external 60% keyboard. This is the key in the top-left corner, and frequently not used (by me, anyway).

Before I spend more time wrestling with JSON syntax, could someone confirm that the current version of Karabiner Elements can configure this key like:

* pressing it results in Esc
* shift + grave/tilde results in tilde
* fn + grave/tilde results in grave

[Alan Schmitt]

"MD" == Michael Dixon <dixi...@gmail.com> writes:

MD> * pressing it results in Esc
MD> * shift + grave/tilde results in tilde
MD> * fn + grave/tilde results in grave

I'm pretty sure you can do that, using complex modifications.

Alan

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[Michael Dixon]

You were right. I kept playing around with it and finally got it to work. I struggle keeping track of all the brackets and braces in JSON, but it's now working the way I want.

One interesting thing (maybe just the way I implemented) is that I couldn't get "to_if_alone" to work to send the Escape key. I had to instead specify that grave/tilde plus any modifier should send Escape, and I put that as the last remapping in my karabiner.json file. I figured "to_if_alone" would work, but at the end of the day, the any modifier approach is probably better, since it will now allow for Cmd+Opt+Esc, etc.

[sejtam]

Would you be able to share your resulting JSON file  as I am struggling with the same thing?

[sejtam]

Nvm. I adapted what you have to a Complex Conversions .json file . I had to add a few (left-option/right-option) extra settings but it works now