faunt / caps-drag

Map unused caps lock key to macOS drag.

⇪ Caps Drag

Do you drag stuff? Do you drop it? Do you like using CAPS LOCK? Do you have long finger nails and gentle hands like me?

If you answered yes and no to those questions, ⇪ Caps Drag might be for you.

It's for anyone who ya, now that you mention it, dragging stuff does feels like being handcuffed to my mac. A productivity and ergonomics hack for anyone with accessibility needs to barely lift a pinky finger in their daily work.

With ⇪ Caps Drag, you can drag and scrub and resize and draw boxes by literally barely lifting your pinky finger. Your left pinky finger. And putting it on the caps lock key. Then effortlessly waving a single finger across your trackpad to draw before dropping with that gentle pinky again.

No more claw hands contorting, clenching, killing. Relax. Lift those pinkies. Do more better and faster. Everything is fine now.

Problem to solve

• break free from the tyranny of longpress while dragging
• leverage macOS’s accessibility settings for alternative control methods, while circumventing their keystroke limitations
• repurpose unused ⇪ caps lock key, toggling drag by ever so slightly lifting a pinky finger on your left hand

Quick start

Setup requires mapping an accessibility switch to drag, mapping that key to caps lock, and moving a script to perform the script each time your Mac boots up.

1. From System Preferences > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Alternative Control Methods check ✅ "Enable aternative pointer actions" and configure Options…
2. hit plus + to add a new Physical Switch
3. hit F13 on external keyboard
4. Place com.user.hidutilScript.plist in {user}/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.hidutilScript.plist. Update {user} to your username by opening the .plist in a code editor
5. Move hidutilScript.zsh to {user}/Library/logs/hidutilScript.zsh or wherever so long as you update .plist the step above

To do

• validate whether this deserves even a minute more time. Does anyone benefit from this?
• does Magic Trackpad gen 2 solve this? If hard press on gen 1 goes away, is there still a need?
• touchbar laptops: need to learn more about touchbar button mappings; Apple’s technical note TN2450 pertains to USB keyboard spec, so only seems to work for connected keyboards
• bundle as a one-time download and install utility
• icon, brand, marketing ?!

FAQ

But what if I still want to use caps lock?

Don’t. Just stop.