karaconv

Karabiner was a very flexible keyboard/mouse remapping program that ran on macOS up to 10.11. Karabiner-Elements is its replacement, and it does mostly the same thing. But there was no way to migrate your old configuration. Until now.

This program converts configuration files from Karabiner (private.xml) to Karabiner-Elements (karabiner.json).

Caveats:

• The format of private.xml is documented, but it is sometimes vague or inconsistent
• The format of karabiner.json is completely undocumented
• Taking the above two points under consideration, I wrote this tool by looking at the docs, my own configuration, and guessing, and I stopped when it was powerful enough to parse my own private.xml. It doesn't support the entire format.

If you try karaconv and it can't parse your private.xml, please post an issue (or pull request)!

Installation

If you have Rust and Cargo installed, you can simply run cargo install karaconv.

Otherwise, you can download the binary from the Releases tab.

Usage

First, you need to find private.xml. On my machine it's in ~/Library/Application Support/Karabiner. You can find it by opening Karabiner Preferences (the old one), going to the "Misc & Uninstall" tab, and clicking on "Open private.xml". This will open Finder to the folder containing private.xml.

Next, find karabiner.json. There's no comparable way to open it from Karabiner-Elements Preferences, but I assume (again in the absence of documentation) that it is always in ~/.config/karabiner.

Now you can run the converter:

karaconv -i /path/to/private.xml -o /path/to/karabiner.json

This will add all configuration from private.xml into karabiner.json (overwriting any Complex Modifications with the same name, which is helpful if you edit private.xml and then run the converter again). The old karabiner.json will be backed up first, but you can pass -n if you want to just see the new JSON without having it printed anywhere.