If you have a Mac and want to use a keyboard that’s designed to be used with a British Windows-based PC, you’ll notice that some of the keys don’t produce the expected characters. @ and ” are generally swapped, for example. In addition the Command (Apple), Option and Control keys may be swapped round. Each of these problems needs to be tackled separately UPDATE: Many of these methods have problems with Snow Leopard. Is reported to work fine. Read comments for more information. ![]() MacOS Mail employs your Mac's systemwide spelling checker. In addition to specifying one or more languages for it to check, you can pick variations for Scroll through the list of available languages. Pay attention to language variants—Australian English is not the same as U.S. English, for example. (22 October 2009) This page supersedes two older versions of these instructions (, ). If you want more background information you might find useful stuff there. Moving Command, Option and Control keys If you’re using Mac OS X 10.0.1 - 10.3.8, then lets you swap and change the Command, Option and Control keys around via a moderately friendly System Preferences pane. UControl doesn’t work on Mac OS X 10.4+ (Tiger), but Apple has built a similar feature into the System Preferences. Open the System Preferences application and click ‘Keyboard & Mouse’. Then click the ‘Modifier Keys’ button in the bottom left. Re-map your keys and click OK. I change mine to look like this picture: In some versions of OS X, these changes apply to all keyboards — so if you have a laptop with a PC keyboard plugged in, you’ll have to re-map the modifier keys whenever you want to use your laptop’s keyboard. At some point, certainly in OS X 10.5.5 you can choose these changes to apply to only your external keyboard. Moving punctuation keys Another addition since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is the ‘Change Keyboard Type’ button next to the ‘Modifier Keys’ button in the ‘Keyboard & Mouse’ preference pane. I hoped this would take standard Windows-oriented UK PC keyboards into account, but I’ve had little luck with it. Whichever keyboard type it suggests for me, none fix the problem of wrongly-mapped characters. Instead, we will use a custom Keyboard Layout to re-map the troublesome keys. While I haven’t had problems with this over the years, I can’t take responsibility for anything that goes wrong if you follow these instructions. • Download or, unzip it, and place the enclosed British-Windows-2.rsrc file in your ‘/Users/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts/’ folder (if you don’t have a ‘Keyboard Layouts’ folder there, just create one). You should make sure to unzip the file by double-clicking it in the Finder, rather than using the command line, as it appears this can corrupt this particular file. ![]() • Next, open System Preferences and click ‘International’. Click ‘Input Menu’ and select the checkbox next to ‘British - Windows - 2’. • Make sure the checkbox at the bottom of the window, next to ‘Show input menu in menu bar’, is selected and then quit System Preferences. • Now you should be able to select the ‘British - Windows - 2’ keyboard layout from the little icon towards the right of the menu bar. Hopefully your keys should now be re-mapped successfully: try typing! This layout swaps ” and @, and also the ` and keys. You might need to log out and back in again (or restart your Mac).
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