Customizing the OS X keyboard map

May 08, '01 01:15:42PM

Contributed by: robg

There have been a couple of help requests for remapping the OS X keyboard. There's very little info out there right now about this topic, but I just stumbled across a bit of evidence that it should be possible, although more difficult than it has been in the past.

Reading the MacAddict forums, I came across a thread called OS X Key Mappings. In that thread, there's an email posted from Marcel Bresnick, the author of "PrefEdit," who also has written some OS X Server 1.x keyboard mapping hacks. Here's a snippet of his response on customizing the OS X keyboard maps:

The keyboard layouts are stored in:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Frameworks/
  HIToolbox.framework/Resources/*.lproj/Localized.rsrc

The * has to be replaced by the respective language name. Every language package contains 32 keyboard maps for _all_ keyboards, so there are in fact 224 (!) keyboard definitions. (This doesn't make sense, looks like a quick hack to implement Macintosh keyboards on top of Darwin...) If you want to do it right, you would have to repeat the keyboard redefinition for all language packages.
He goes on to explain how to edit the files (in theory, not step-by-step). Head on over to MacAddict and read the rest of the Marcel's email for an overview of how the process would work. Warning - this editing is not for the timid, and if you mess up, you'll have no keyboard -- so back everything up first, and make sure you know how to use single-user mode!

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20010508131542947