MacOS – Is it possible to connect to AirPods Pro via keyboard shortcut

airpodsbluetoothkeyboardmacos

I want to connect to my AirPods Pro on mac (Big Sur 11.1) using keyboard shortcut. I find it tedious to manually choose the top-right icon on the menu bar and click 'connect', but at the same time I don't want to make the pairing automatic since not always do I want to connect to my mac, such as while I play the music on my iPad.

So I want to connect to it via keyboard shortcut. Is it possible? It's fine to use 3rd-party apps such as Hammarspoon or Karabiner-Elements, though I could not find a way to connect to the AirPods.

Best Answer

Karabiner + Blueutil Solution

I do something like this using a bluetooth cli tool named blueutil. Here is a complex modification you could use in Karabiner.

{
    "title": "Bluetooth Connect",
    "rules": [
        {
            "description": "Connect to AirPods",
            "manipulators": [
                {
                    "from": {
                        "key_code": "a",
                        "modifiers": {
                            "mandatory": ["fn"]
                        }
                    },
                    "to": [
                        {
                            "shell_command": "/usr/local/bin/blueutil -p 1; /usr/local/bin/blueutil --connect \"AirPods Pro\""
                        }
                    ],
                    "type": "basic"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

+ Goku

Goku is a tool for more easily managing your karabiner configuration. I use this to manage mine. I have configured Karabiner to use F10 as a "audio layer"/modifier key for audio related mappings. If you learn a little about how Goku works, you can check out my configuration if you want to implement something like this for yourself.

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