I'm currently working on a project that requires me to remote in to a computer to write and deploy code. Being in Hawaii, I tend to get around 100ms of latency, making every interaction with the remote computer a pain.

Every click, keystroke, and scroll is hit with a 100ms lag. I can go on about how painful this is, but let's find the bright side.

The computer I remote into is a Windows machine. I haven't personally used a Windows machine as my daily driver in nearly fifteen years. The keybinds feel off - alt + tab instead of cmd + tab, ctrl instead of cmd - but we have a solution.

Karabiner-Elements is a free and open-sourced and claims to be "A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for macOS".

It's easy enough to swap one key to another. But, I only want ctrl to be mapped to cmd while I'm inside of my remote Windows environment. This requires adding your own complex modification.

Here's my complex modification JSON config:

{
    "manipulators": [
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "bundle_identifiers": [
                        "^com\\.microsoft\\.rdc\\.macos"
                    ],
                    "type": "frontmost_application_if"
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "left_gui",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": { "key_code": "left_control" },
            "type": "basic"
        }
    ],
    "title": "Command Key to Control in Windows App"
}

This explicitly states that while the Windows App (^com\\.microsoft\\.rdc\\.macos) is the frontmost application, my left cmd key is mapped to the left control key. I personally only use the left command key, so this fine for me.

Now, whenever I am interacting with the Windows App, the command key on my keyboard is mapped to the control key, making it easier and feel more natural to navigate around the Windows machine.

NOTE: Occasionally Karabiner Elements stops working after your computer goes to sleep. If you encounter this, you may need to run the following commands in your terminal:

sudo pkill -f Karabiner -9 # Kills the main Karabiner UI
sudo pkill -f karabiner -9 # Kills the background processes

Then, relaunch the application and it should begin working again.