Swap real keystroke for a virtual one

[d-miketa]

Having rebound M+h to moving focus west, I realised how much I miss the hide functionality! You can rebind it using System Preferences, but only on an app-by-app basis, eg Safari > Hide Safari. This is impractical so I was wondering if it's possible to bind another keystroke, say S-M-m, and have skhd capture it and send a 'virtual' M+h to the OS? So Mac OS would still think that M+h was pressed and hide the appropriate app, but the physical combination of Cmd and H could be kept for navigation.

[koekeishiya]

This is possible, yes. I don't remember if skhd will intercept keypresses that it synthesizes using skhd -k "..". If so this will require some thought to implement properly without breaking the use-case where we can intercept keys that we ourselves post - which is useful for other reasons.

I have lately been rather annoyed by my decision to not use a unix domain socket for integration with external tools. There are also other things I want to support such as being able to differentiate between press, repeat, and release events, and so I am strongly thinking about reworking both the syntax and a fair part of the program structure. If I end up doing so, I will definitely try to keep this in mind.

[d-miketa]

Sounds good!

In the meantime I realised you could easily remap the hiding functionality using Applescript:

osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set frontProcess to first process whose frontmost is true" -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set visible of frontProcess to false"

Leaving it here in case anyone finds it useful.