Way back when, I set my PowerBook's useless (to me anyway) Fn key to trigger Exposé. Cool and all, but I found I never used Exposé -- except when I hit the Fn key by accident! Along came Dashboard, and I knew my Fn key would finally find its ... er ... function! But the Dashboard and Exposé prefs panel didn't allow me to set it for Dashboard -- it was only available in the pop-up list for Exposé. D'oh!
Well, I don't give up easily, and although it was a lot harder than I anticipated, I figured out how to set Fn for Dashboard. Read on, though this ain't for the faint of heart!
Here's what I did...
$ cd ~/Library/Preferences
$ plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.symbolickeys.plist -o com.apple.symbolickeys.xml
$ vi com.apple.symbolickeys.xml
<key>62</key>
<dict>
<key>enabled</key>
<false/>
</dict>
<key>63</key>
<dict>
<key>enabled</key>
<false/>
</dict>
Replace the above with the following:
<key>62</key>
<dict>
<key>enabled</key>
<true/>
<key>value</key>
<dict>
<key>parameters</key>
<array>
<integer>8388608</integer>
<integer>8388608</integer>
</array>
<key>type</key>
<string>modifier</string>
</dict>
</dict>
<key>63</key>
<dict>
<key>enabled</key>
<true/>
<key>value</key>
<dict>
<key>parameters</key>
<array>
<integer>8519680</integer>
<integer>8519680</integer>
</array>
<key>type</key>
<string>modifier</string>
</dict>
</dict>
I told you it was scary!plutil -convert binary1 com.apple.symbolickeys.xml -o com.apple.symbolickeys.plist
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