Real Mac UK Keyboard Layout
I hate the Apple UK keyboard layout. I detest it. Defensible as it may be to enhance cross-Atlantic keyboard familiarity, and rational as it might be to place double-quote above single, I still cannot stand it. If I were a ‘switcher’, and had decreed that, from last March, only Apple computers were sufficiently worthy to be graced by my fingertips, I might have come to live with it but I object to having to remap my brain-finger pathways every time I move from one platform to another (remembering which clipboard / paste buffer to use is struggle enough).
All this is an elaborate way of saying that I’ve made a set of truly UK-compatible keyboard layouts for my MacBook Pro and the standard UK USB keyboard I sometimes plug into it. These layouts work for 10.5 “Leopard” and possibly others. They can be found by in my RealUKKeyboardLayouts.zip file.
In this zip file you’ll find the two layouts and two similarly-named .icns files which allow you to identify the layouts at a glance. They’re not very pretty but they do the job.
Unzip the archive and, for each user who wants to “type proper” again, place the files in ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ (creating the directory if required). Log out and back in to allow Mac OS to discover the new layouts (supposedly /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ can be used for system-wide layouts, but this was not the case on my first attempt and, as I’m the only user of my laptop who cares about such things, I didn’t delve further).
Now open the “International” Preference Pane. On the “input menu” tab, check “Show input menu in menu bar”. You’ll need this because, just occasionally, Leopard will switch you back to a system ‘blessed’ layout and you’ll spend hours cursing your mistaken “@”s until you figure out what’s happened. Now scroll through the keyboard layouts and check “Real UK” and “Real UK – IBM/PC” to allow these layouts to be selected from the input menu.
Close the preference pane, select the appropriate layout from the menu bar, and that’s it.
Oh yes: in case you were wondering, these layouts were created with the eccentric but indispensible Ukelele which guides you through the entire process. This will be particularly useful if you want a layout for a keyboard other than my provided MacBook Pro or IBM/PC layouts.
5 Responses to 'Real Mac UK Keyboard Layout'
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Wow, thanks a lot! Another really useful about:nothing triumph. This seems to work perfectly on my MacBook with 10.4. The “Real UK” layout corresponds exactly to what’s on my anti-RSI Kinesis Freestyle keyboard.
The only trouble now is that I’ve spent the last few months pressing the # key when I want a \ character, @ to get a “, ~ for a |, | for a ~, and so on and so on. It may take a while to get my brain remapped back to normal. Particularly since the input menu seems to like switching keyboard layouts by itself from time to time – in the last few minutes it’s switched to “UK” and to “Real UK – IBM/PC”. Maybe if I just untick them in the International control panel…
MacOS’s tendency to switch of its own accord is rather irritating – however as a Tiger user you might well have the option of unchecking all Apple Layouts; Leopard does not allow this.
One thing: the default layout-switch keybinding is Command+Space, which is also the default for spotlight. It’s disabled by default on 10.5, but maybe enabled and conflicting on 10.4?
This also works fine on 10.6 “Snow Leopard”.
[...] at work, with different keyboard layouts, so it’s driving me pretty crazy. Enough is enough. Real Mac UK Keyboard Layout (hat tip: Greg Knapp). Tags: Macs Share this [...]
Still works on 10.7 Lion. Fingers crossed for 10.8 and beyond, assuming you still get a keyboard with your Mac in 2015…