Adding Apple’s Globe key to a QMK-powered keyboard

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Style Pass

2024-11-18 21:30:13

I don’t remember when Apple quasi-promoted the Globe 🌐︎ key to act as a modifier that can be used much like Control, Option, and Command, but it’s becoming increasingly useful to have it handy nowadays.

A lot of these can also be achieved with the mouse, much in the same vein as Aero Snap. I also recently discovered that if you fill the screen with two perfectly adjacent windows, you can effortlessly adjust the division by hovering over the middle of the boundary—it summons a little handle that you can grab. Accordingly, the “Left & Right” and “Right & Left” commands (⌃⇧🌐︎ ←, ⌃⇧🌐︎ →) arranges your last two windows into this exact configuration. It’s all very neat!

Alongside the updated iMacs released last October also came refreshed Mac accessories, finally outfitted with USB-C ports. I have been waiting for this for months. On the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad, the Globe key was moved from the nav cluster to be adjacent to Control, shrinking the surrounding keys. In its place is a new Menu key, which does as you expect. It’s probably equivalent to pressing ⌃↩ (Control-Enter), a functionality that is also new in Sequoia.

These new windowing commands and the moving of the Globe key leads me to conclude that Apple would like us to take advantage of these spiffy shortcuts involving Globe. (There’s also some lesser known ones—🌐︎ C opens Control Center, 🌐︎ N summons Notification Center, etc. More here and here.)