Emacskeys

Emacs-style Control and Meta in almost any app.

Emacskeys is a native Mac menu bar utility that listens for key presses at the session level, translates common Emacs-style Control and Option (Meta) shortcuts into the shortcuts macOS apps already understand, and re-injects those events. ⌘ chords are never intercepted, so your muscle memory for Command stays untouched.

It is meant for editing and navigation habits borrowed from Emacs: movement by character and word, kill and yank patterns, search, undo, and a small C-x prefix chain. It is not for replacing each app's own shortcuts wholesale.

What is remapped

Movement (for example C-f / C-b / C-n / C-p as arrows, C-a / C-e as line home/end), basic editing (C-h, C-d), paging (C-v, M-v), clipboard (C-w, C-y, M-w), word motion (M-f, M-b), search (C-s, C-r), undo variants, C-g as Escape, and several C-x … second keys (save, open, window cycling, tabs, close). M-c, M-u, and M-l stay native so title-case shortcuts still work as Apple intended.

Pass-through

Remote-desktop and screen-sharing style apps (and real Emacs builds) are detected by bundle identifier so keys pass through unchanged. You do not hijack a session on another machine. If something feels wrong in a new client, the philosophy is still "when in doubt, do not remap."

Menu bar

A small menu extra opens Preferences (mostly the C-x prefix timeout) and Quit. There is no separate dock window; it stays out of the way until you need it.

Permissions

Accessibility and Input Monitoring must both be enabled in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Quit and relaunch after toggling them so the event tap can attach. The app is not sandboxed; that restriction would block the kind of low-level event work this tool does.

Privacy

No Yakshaven analytics inside Emacskeys. Permission prompts follow Apple's usual flows. See the Privacy Policy.

Requirements

macOS 13 (Ventura) or later.

Availability

Not distributed yet. Download link will go here after signing, notarisation, and any store listing.