Karabiner Elements and Razer Tartarus

Very specific problem here but figured someone might be in a similar situation.

Since switching to Big Sur, the Razer software no longer works. It’s not been updated in ages so I’m not entirely surprised by this (when it did work I had to plug it out and in whenever the Mac went into sleep mode as it would lose the connection which was… irritating) but it left me with a non functional gaming tool that I used constantly.

After checking out a few threads, I saw various people recommend using ‘Karabiner Elements’ a free keybinding software. And it works… for some of the keys. With it installed I can remap about 2/3rds of the keys on the Tartarus - others (the 6, 10, 11, 15, and 16) are stubbornly refusing to accept any key binds. As is the side button (which I used to use to toggle autorun).

Anyone had this problem?

I just took the plunge of switching my orbweaver over to using karabiner so I could upgrade to Big Sur. I had the same issue where hitting certain keys did not register what they were in the app. I found opening up a text document and hitting those keys made it easier to find what they were really mapped to, things like tab, shift, ctrl, etc.

Did you ever find a way of hard forcing key mapping options? On my tartarus for example some keys simply do nothing. And any attempt to get the app to register them fail.

If you go into the Simple Modifications tab, use the drop down to select the device, hit add item, you can then force map stuff. For example on my orbweaver 06 does not map to anything when i click the from key drop down and press it, but by playing around in a document I found it was really tab. So then I just manually selected tab and remapped it. Had to do that for keys 06, 11, 16, etc. They were things like left alt, tab, left shift, etc that don’t show up when you press anything in karabiner.

I might need to poke at this a bit more.

The problem I’m finding is the Tartarus has 19+ keys. And a bunch of them I press do nothing - both in a document or in a game. Key 06 for example? Nada. Same with key 15.

I might try uninstalling it and starting afresh. Feels like it ‘almost’ works but not quite.

Do you also have the karibener event viewer installed? If you launch that (may have to give it permissions in settings > security > privacy > input monitoring) it can show you in real time what keys are being pressed.

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This is what I did with my Orbweaver. Once I figured out the correlation between the orbweaver and keyboard , it was easy.

Sorry - meant to reply to this earlier.

I have tried tracking it through the event viewer before now. I’m finding there’s a lot of either ‘nothing’ or ‘repeating keys’.

As an in-depth example, I used to use the 5, 10, and 15s for less used effects like:

5: My go to interrupt (assigned to e)
10: My fast movement Key (assigned to f)
15: Usually an area effect like dispel magic or ring of peace. (assigned to r)

Keybinding 5 and 10 worked fine. Keybinding 15 is impossible. If I click on it in elements and see what it ‘reads’ as it comes up as ‘f’. Or, whatever I assign the 10 key to. Its like all it does it map to the 10 key. I’ve tried manually changing this by assigning a new key, clicking it and scrolling till I find the r key but it does nothing. And pressing it in, say, a word doc gives no response.

Other keys like 6 are equally dead. I was hoping to use that one for tab targeting but, alas, the key once again doesn’t register being pressed.

I realize it’s much later, but I found an easy way to identify what the various razer tartarus v2 keys actually map to. If you go to https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/?q=日 and find the corresponding header for the device, use the “import” select to “view json”, you can browse through the json that maps the keys. For example, I was struggling with the tartarus 16 key and in the json it shows that it maps to ‘left_shift’. So I created a karabiner rule for that key and it works (in my case ‘left_shift’ → ‘tab’)

Been totally frustrated by youtube vids, forums, razer support, and then I found this golden nugget from you… Left shift was killing my 16 and now that I knew what it was, I was able to re-map in Karabiner-Elements! Just wanted to say thanks so much! :sunglasses: