The Hyper Key Is My New Best Friend
MACSTORIES EXTRAS
More stories for Club members.
The Hyper Key Is My New Best Friend
This week, I learned about something new: the Hyper key. (I also learned that TIL means “today I learned”, but I digress.) The Hyper key is a modifier key that originates from the Space-Cadet keyboard used on MIT Lisp machines – “the holy grail of keyboards”, according to the Deskauthority Wiki. You don’t find it on keyboards anymore, but it is still as relevant and vital today as ever.
On the Mac, the Hyper key is a combination of Shift + Control + Option + Command. Activating them with a single key is important because pressing all four at the same time gets your fingers in all sorts of tangled knots. The Hyper key exists as a way to issue system-wide keyboard commands without getting mixed up with the Command and Option keys, which are typically assigned to other app commands.