PSA: hyper modifier on OSX

Just a quick PSA for those of you who are using the hyper modifier (command+control+alt+shift) on OSX. I recently discovered that OSX has a few undocumented hotkeys:
Hyper-w - run wifi diagnostics
Hyper-. - run system diagnostics
Hyper-, - open most recent system diagnostic

These hotkeys do a couple of things. (a) they cause screen to flash momentarily; (b) they dump a huge log file to /private/var/tmp.

If you are like me and have mapped one of these keys to a commonly-used action (say, for window management) and are wondering what that weird flash is on the screen every now and then, and why you’re running low on disk space, here’s your answer.

Unfortunately there appears to be no way to turn off this hotkey (some dev probably figured they were rarely-used enough to just co-opt them – may a thousand fleas, flies, camels and other vermin fester in their armpits) so I ended up switching to use meh instead of hyper for my window-management hotkeys.

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I hit similar issues, especially for things like binding Hyper-h to the left arrow key, and then using it with other modifiers (e.g. Cmd-shift-hyper-h as Cmd-shift-left-arrow).

Solution I found online was to use F17 as the Hyper key instead of Cmd-ctrl-opt-shift.

I have this working on my built-in keyboard (originally using Karabiner Elements, now using Hammerspoon, and hidutil directly for the key remapping), and on the Model 01 by directly mapping to F17.


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