ZOOM Pro Tip - Build your own keyboard

ZOOM is fast becoming a new verb - the Covid-19 induced remote meeting craze has propelled ZOOM to the popularity reminiscent of the old days with Google search.

So you have a lot of ZOOM meetings, now what? Same here at Tsingyuan Ventures. We've been a big fan of ZOOM for years. Our meeting rooms were all setup and optimized for ZOOM meeting (Vizio 70" TV, Chromebox, Logitech C9x0 webcam, Jabra Wireless speaker/mic).

Now that we are all working from home, I've been optimizing my home office for ZOOM meetings for all the family members. Here I want to share one pro tip - build your own ZOOM keyboard, sort of.

ZOOM has many keyboard shortcuts to make things even more efficient. Some of my favorite shortcuts are mute/unmute audio and mute/unmute video. It comes especially useful in a WFH scenario. However, the shortcuts are long - in MacOS it is Command + Shift + A and Command + Shift + V respectively. Wouldn't it be great to have a simpler keystroke to do the mute/unmute?

Yes, it would. Enter open source keyboard mod tool Karabiner. You can download the tool for free. After a bit digging around, I found out it is quite straightforward to map almost any keys with a simple JSON file. For example, I mapped two less used function keys to audio and video mute/unmute. Depends on what you need, you can choose other mappings as well. Happy ZOOMing!