Intro to skhd

I learned about skhd recently, actually after coming across the yabai project. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving away from Hammerspoon for my hotkey and window management, so I took the opportunity to explore skhd as a possible alternative.

Initial setup

To get started on macOS, I followed the guide in the project README. First, I installed skhd via brew.

brew install koekeishiya/formulae/skhd

The instructions say to start the service immediately with

skhd --start-service

I think it makes more sense to first write a skhdrc config file and validate your syntax is good. I created my config file at ~/.config/skhd/skhdrc with the following initial contents:

shift + cmd - j : echo 'hello SKHD'

I validated my config file by running in verbose mode

skhd --verbose

which output

skhd: successfully created pid-file..
skhd: using config '/Users/danielcorin/.config/skhd/skhdrc'
hotkey :: #1 {
  mod: 'shift'
  mod: 'cmd'
  key: 'j' (0x26)
  cmd: 'echo 'hello SKHD''
}
skhd: watching files for changes:
  /Users/danielcorin/.config/skhd/skhdrc

I didn’t get any output to the console or log file from my command when running in verbose mode. After confirming the configuration was valid, I started skhd with

skhd --start-service

then tailed the logs to validate the effects of my hotkey

tail -f /tmp/skhd_$USER.out.log

Pressing ⌘ Command + ⇧ Shift + J, I validated that hello SKHD showed up in the log file.

Doing something useful

With skhd, we can bind arbitrary shell commands to hotkeys. The following creates a daily post entry in my blog, using a script in the repo:

shift + cmd - j : cd /Users/danielcorin/dev/hugo/blog && make log

This hotkey runs Python code via make from my blog directory’s script folder to create a file then opens the file as well. The hotkey improves my workflow from running make log in my blog’s project directory to running ⌘ + ⇧ + J anywhere.

Takeaways

skhd is a nice hotkey management tool but feels a bit raw. It would be nice if there were some additional quality of life features to help as you work through the learning curve of the tool, like hotkey collision detection and logging in verbose model. Once you get used to it though, it’s quite powerful and simple. It pushes you move the complexity of your action out of skhdrc and into scripts that it can invoke. I prefer this separation-of-concerns approach to my current Hammerspoon config, which has the hotkey bindings and action logic all together, though splitting this up would be straightforward. I’m not completely sold yet, but skhd remains a candidate to adopt into my workflow. If I can figure out a nice solution for toggle apps, I might make the switch.