Apple keyboard, windows XP and even synergy
While I prefer using one of my macs for everything, it so happens that the place I work really relies on Microsoft to serve them everything. Not my call, but I just have to make the best of it. For this reason I have my own macbook and a windows machine at work. However, since I do most of my actual work on the mac and just use the windows machine for connecting to certain proprietary stuff, I found it natura to have a mac keyboard in work. This had a few challenges.
The first challenge was just about finding the proper drivers. Apple, for some reason, do not make the necessary drivers easily available. The only way to get them is to extract them from boot camp. Luckily someone have already done this. You will need the KeyboardInstaller.exe and BootCamp.msi.
Once you have them both installed, you’ll see that most of your keys work as expected, except (at least in my case) ⌥ and ⌘, both left and right. Well, they work, but they are swapped. First I tried something called “Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4″, but that didn’t even show three keys to the left of the space bar, so no dice there.
First I found an application called [AutoHotKey] but this had alot more funtionality than I needed, but in the docs I found a reference to another application called KeyTweak. KeyTweak not only allows you to remap files, but it does it natively (in registry), which means that you don’t need any applications running for it to work, and it will work in all applications and games.
After remapping your keys, which is really easy, you just reboot and everything works as expected. Keep in mind that you have to map both ways, Left Alt to Left Windows, and Left Windows to Left Alt. Do the same thing for the Right Alt and Right Windows too.
Now you can have a peek at Apples keyboard mapping in XP and get full advantage of your lovely keyboard.
I just want to mention that this works exactly as expected over synergy too. Even if you have your keyboard connected to the windows machine and use synergy over to OS X, it feels like it’s connected to the Mac because all keys work exactly like the native OS X keys.
Amazing… I actually found someone with this exact same problem. I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to fix it.
For the past 2 years I’ve used synergy with xp and a mac, and I’ve mapped my brain to switch keys automatically, except that now I need them to be the same.
I’m gonna try this out and see if I can get used to it being “correct” now.
Thanks.
Synergy indicates the keyboard commands will be executed on the machine in which the cursor is placed. I'm trying to use the "Print" key on my Windows Vista machine, while my server keyboard is connected to the Mac. However, the print key is no-responsive when its in Window, but it works fine when it's back on the Mac O/S side
Hi Peter, Nice. Thanks for this.There some UI may cause problem but Mac is the best. People are giving their view here http://toostep.com/question/which-has-got-better-... They also say that. Mac is better than Windows.