Press the Option and Shift keys simultaneously to see even more symbols.
#Map keys on mac keyboard how to#
How to see alternative characters and symbols on the keyboard on your Mac The icon for the Keyboard Viewer will sit to the far right of your menu bar, next to the day and time.
Tick the box to Show Keyboard, Emoji, & Symbol Viewers in menu bar. Select the Keyboard Tab on the far left of the sections.Select System Preferences from the dropdown menu. Click on the Apple Icon () in the upper left corner of the menu bar on your Mac.You can enable the Keyboard Viewer so that it stays in your menu bar, always easy to access. How to show the Keyboard Viewer in the menu bar on your Mac The Keyboard Viewer is useful for two reasons: You can see all of the symbols and characters on your keyboard when you press the Option, Control, and Shift keys, and if something should happen to your physical keyboard, you can use it as a temporary fix. Make sure you save backups, patches or scripts to reapply your changes.Apple has this useful little tool for Macs that displays an on-screen keyboard. Preserving changes setxkbmapĪdd the commands to your ~/.bashrc to make them permanent. Log out and in for changes to take effect. Include "level3(lalt_switch)" // EDIT: Make left alt work like alt gr (level 3) Include "level3(ralt_switch)" // EDIT: Make right alt work like alt gr (level 3) Xkb_keycodes // EDIT: shift+4=dollar, alt+4=euro Checking which keycodes file is used $ setxkbmap -print -verbose 10 | grep keycodes The keycodes folder has different files for different keyboard models. This states that keycode 49 sent from the keyboard should map to LSTG (less than, greater than) button. They map the decimal keycodes to an abstract button name. There is a per-keyboard-model mapping in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/. This number is typically represented as a decimal number, up to 255. Keyboards send a number for each key pressed or released. The result is that we address problems in the symbols file which should have been done in keycodes. Since this model isn’t exposed to the user in UI, a normal user doesn’t really know that it exists, or how to change it. This sounds great in theory, except when the system struggles to identify keyboard model automatically. The configuration files can be found in /usr/share/X11/xkb/. Second stage ( symbols) depends on the input source picked in Settings. $ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-optionsįirst stage ( keycodes) depends on the keyboard model. $ dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options "" Use dconf to disable shift+alt toggling of layouts: $ dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options
Disable shift+alt to switch keyboard layout This is generally preferred for writing code, but makes it more difficult to make accented characters. “No dead keys” means that backticks don’t require two clicks, they are inserted immediately. My preferred layout is “Norwegian (Macintosh, no dead keys)”. I recommend using just 1 input source, unless you really need 2 layouts.
#Map keys on mac keyboard plus#
If the input source isn’t already correct, add the correct one with the plus symbol, and remove the incorrect one.Input sources is the important part, “Language” and “Formats” don’t affect your keyboard layout.Some keys in the Macintosh keyboard layout are wrong, and need to be changed.Behavior of alt key needs to be changed to match OS X.Shift+alt already has a function (switching layouts) which will capture the keyboard events.I’m using RHEL 7, and this is specific to X. I will focus on the norwegian mac layout, but the steps should be the same for other layouts. So keyboard shortcuts which rely on alt might not work any more. This blog post shows how, but please note that it changes the behavior of your alt keys. You can make your Apple internal or external keyboard behave like this on Linux. Alternatively: How xkb works, and how to change keys which are wrong.Ĭombinations of shift and alt are used instead.