Keyboard remapping on Mac OS X
The Danish Keyboard mappings for the Mac are insane. The hack-necessary { and } keys are hidden away under a double modifier and various other keys have gone missing. Fortunately you can use Ukulele to remap the keyboard. Even this however is slightly insane, so here's how.
Btw: This is not the good way to do "functional remapping" (i.e. map this key to PageUp) other tools do that.
- Install and open Ukulele (this may not be bizarre to the mac savvy, but the app does not grab focus when you start it)
- File|New
- Choose 'copy from other layout'
- In the Ukulele distribution are copies of all the standard layouts. Danish is under the 'Roman' layouts
- Remember to give your layout a name in the Keyboard menu
- Here's the slightly insane part: The layout is organized by modifiers. The entire layout, that is, e.g. "here's how the keyboard looks when option key is down". You can't use a modifier combination that isn't already in the layout. (You can add new ones through an interface so lacking in intuititiveness that I didn't figure it out). I had little luck mapping cmd-single key to a new character as an example. Mapping stuff to alt-something however works fine, as there is already an alt- keyboard.
- Chose a modifier. Double click a key. Choose a value. Repeat
- Save the file in your ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts
- Go to System Preferences|International|Input Menu and enable your layout there. This is where you'll be sorry if you didn't rename distinctively.
- Log out and then in again
- You should now be done
This is just an intermediate fix so typing is actually possible. Now all I need is proper universal page down and up and other things the non-Mac world is used to.
Posted by Claus at February 22, 2009 10:37 AM