Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Key Remapping on Mac

I started typing in Dvorak some 2 years ago.  I've been curious over the years and I read a post by a friend that made me finally make the jump.  Stop Typing Like a Spider by Dave South.

I bought stickers to put on my keyboard and convinced my wife to switch as well.  It took about a month before I felt comfortable typing in Dvorak and for the most part I think it was a really good switch.  My fingers don't get as tired typing as they once did.   My biggest gripe was the cut/copy/paste keys moved. I recently looked into Colemak, which looks actually better and keeps the placement of the shortcut keys.  I'm not sure I want to switch right now, but perhaps soon in the future. See Wikipedia  and http://colemak.com/ for more information.

That brings me to the reason for the title of this post:

I recently got a mac book pro and put an OWC Solid state drive in it with a data doubler insert. (this lets me have two drives in my macbook a SSD, which is fast, and a normal HD for space.)  It works like a charm.  There are a few downsides, I don't have a disk drive internally and Mac DVD Player does not like that.  And my Eject key is now worthless.  So as a good keyboard hacker, I wanted to re-purpose that key.  Along with the fact that I wanted to remap a few other keys.  I ran into a little tool for Macs called KeyRemap4MacBook.  It works on all macs.  It let me remap my eject key to a forward delete key, which I use all the time.  It also re-maps a slew of other key combinations.  I took the Colemak layout design and got rid of my caps lock key and now have delete there.  It's still not habit, but the tool to remap keys was very cool and rather complete as far as I'm concerned. 

I've had problems with parallels and the Dvorak keyboard layout and looked into remapping them with something different than the system preferences layout.

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