Keyboard overlay themes and keycaps on macOS

Each family sets five things at once: the keycap style, the frame treatment behind the keys, the material the caps are made of, the press effect they use when a key goes down, and the colours for every key category. That is why Gaming is not Dark with different colours — it snaps rather than travels, and it sits in a tighter, higher-contrast frame.

System is the only family that moves on its own: it follows the Mac's light or dark appearance. The other eight stay where you put them, which is what you want when footage recorded weeks apart has to match. The keyboard and the pointer pick from separate galleries, so a restrained keyboard can sit alongside a loud cursor halo, or the reverse.

You cannot edit a built-in family, and the settings pane says so plainly: built-in themes are read-only, your Custom theme is preserved. Next to that line sits an Edit Custom button, which copies the family you are looking at into the Custom slot and switches you to it. From there you are editing your own theme, and the preset you started from is still intact.

There is exactly one Custom keyboard theme and one Custom pointer theme. Both are autosaved — no naming step, no save button — and both survive quitting the app. Reset Custom Theme takes one back to defaults, and asks before it does.

The pointer forks more eagerly: change any pointer control while a preset is selected and that preset is copied into Custom for you. The keyboard waits for the button, because its editing controls only appear once Custom is the active theme.

The style is a theme-wide default, and it is also one of the per-category overrides, so it does not have to be the same for every key. A two-cap chord like ⌘Z is the test of whichever you pick: one modifier, one letter, read at a glance at your recording size or not at all.

Inside the Custom theme, keys are grouped into ten categories — Letters & Digits, Command, Shift, Option, Control, Caps Lock, Escape, Function, Navigation and Editing. Each one has an Override switch, and only the categories you actually switch on are stored; the rest keep following the active theme, so changing family later does not strand a half-finished palette.

The practical use of this is colour-coding: give the four modifiers strong, distinct colours and leave letters neutral. A viewer then reads a shortcut by colour before they read the glyphs, which is exactly what you want in a fast demo.

Labels use the System, Rounded or Monospaced presets, or any font installed on your Mac, at four weights from regular to bold with a size scale on top. That is what lets the overlay match the typeface of the app you are demonstrating instead of fighting it.

Key spacing sets how tightly the caps sit together — tighter for a compact strip in a corner, looser when the overlay is the subject of the shot. Text colour is its own control, and so are border colour and border width, up to six points; the border row appears only for the Flat and Minimal styles, where an outline is what separates a cap from the content behind it.

Three overlay sizes — small, medium and large — sit above an opacity slider that runs from 30% to full. Opacity applies to the finished overlay rather than to each layer separately, so a translucent keyboard still reads as one object instead of a stack of ghosts.

The short banners that confirm a toggle — Keypress On, Shortcuts Only, Keyboard hidden — Secure Input — are themed alongside the keyboard, and the Custom theme gives them three controls of their own: background, text and accent. All of it sits under a live preview showing a resting and a pressed keycap side by side, so a press effect can be judged without leaving Settings.