A tiny trick to remap keys on macOS X

Recently I switched from an EN-US MacBook Pro Keyboard to a DE keyboard. Suddenly, I found an unexpected problem with keys layout.

There are several differences in the layout. You may have a look to all possible keyboard layouts here

The main difference is that in EU version of the keyboard we have additional buttons, Enter key is vertical, Left Shift key is shorted to give a room for an extra key.

The problem is as follows: tilde key is near 1 in the EN-US keyboard (and other PC keyboards), while it is between Shift and Z in the EU keyboards.

Also, on Mac OS we use CMD+tilde to switch between windows on the same App. I have even installed Easy Window Switcher to have the same experience on Windows!

It is hard for me to learn the trick. And it will not work correctly, if you remap a key. Namely, in Russian keyboard layout the remapped shortcut will not work. Yeah! MacOS System shortcuts DO depend on keyboard layout. Sad story.

I can across a tiny and nice article to remap keys on MacOS. TN2450

And the way to re-map keys is the following:

hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000064,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000035},{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000035,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000064}]}'

That is all you need. Next you’d need to have a patched Russian keyboard to fix Ё character. For the fix I use ukelele

Anyway, you do not need to install ANY third-party apps to solve the key-remapping problems

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