Plain Hyper Key

2025-04-18

Back in the wild-west of computing, in the enlightened age of Lisp-machines, a legendary keyboard that had an outsized influence on the computing world around it arose. The Space Cadet Keyboard. Itself an expansion upon the older Knight Keyboard. Their legends harken back to a day when keyboards had to have buttons for functions that would be otherwise unseen in a terminal environment. To that end, modifier keys were added to expand on the available functions and commands that could be run in applications. Notably: Super and Hyper. Super got co-opted by Microsoft in the late 90’s early ‘00’s as the ‘Windows’ key. Though the usage of the key was never really super popular, and even today there are only a handful of combinations that actually do anything in Windows.

Now

The hyper key, however, only really had interest to folks using the Lisp Machines, and therefore Emacs users. Even today, the hyper key can still be sent as a keycode to Emacs for use. While it doesn’t have any registered key binding, it is just as valid as super, meta/alt and ctrl.

With the uptick in terminal-based program appreciation, folks have come up with all manner of tools that can make use of the hyper key. Even if you don’t have an actual hyper key, there are ways of mapping it. On macOS, there is even an app that that lets you bind various existing keyboard shortcuts to emulate the key for use elsewhere.

What’s Plain About Hyper?

Nothing! But I feel like I oversold this article with all the background info. So, here’s how I use it in my workflow:

• Paste as plain text: I have hyper+v (which is bound to right-command) to paste as stripped down plain text. This is useful when working with a lot of plain text files, as I do frequently.
• Pasteboard history: I have hyper+c bound to showing Maccy’s clipboard history window so I can select older items to then paste somewhere.
• Window snapping: I have hyper+<arrow> bound to snapping windows to various configurations, making it easier to re-arrange things when needed, without resorting to the mouse.

I’m sure there are more useful uses of the hyper key waiting to be found, but these are just some of the items I came up with in exploring the idea for a more keyboard driven workflow.

Do you have the hyper key enabled and bound to something? If so, let me know below! I’d love to have more ideas for being hyper-efficient 😆