2022/10/07/mac-british-keyboards

[utterances-bot]

Making sense of British keyboard layouts on the Mac

So, I have a MacBook. Never owned a Mac before. There are two reasons why I now have one. The reason I like to give is that it will make development for iOS and the cloud easier than a Windows machine. The real reason is that I had a lot of Autodesk applause points to spend before I retired.

https://www.thecandidstartup.org/2022/10/07/mac-british-keyboards.html

[MerfAvenger]

Thank you for writing this - I've battled with Karabiner every time I've set up a new Mac over the years and this has been a really helpful deep dive onto how it works!

Your config is fantastic and thank you for sharing. If you're a looter like me, though, you'll need to go into the karabiner.json the author shared and either change or delete the condition field on each complex rule. This is for Karabiner to activate the rules unless you so happen to have the same keyboard as the author!

                   {
                        "description": "Microsoft @ on shift quote",
                        "manipulators": [
                            {
                                // REMOVE OR MODIFY CONDITIONS TO ALLOW YOUR DEVICES
                                "from": {
                                    "key_code": "quote",
                                    "modifiers": {
                                        "mandatory": [
                                            "shift"
                                        ],
                                        "optional": [
                                            "any"
                                        ]
                                    }
                                },
                                "to": [
                                    {
                                        "key_code": "2",
                                        "modifiers": [
                                            "left_shift"
                                        ],
                                        "repeat": true
                                    }
                                ],
                                "type": "basic"
                            }
                        ]
                    },

[timwiegand]

You're right, my config has rules conditional for my specific keyboards. You can remove the conditions or change them to match your keyboard (you can see the ids needed in the Karabiner UI).

I made my rules conditional for two reasons. FIrst, I was paranoid about screwing up the built in keyboard so made doubly sure my rules wouldn't apply to it. Second, I'd already decided to get another external keyboard with a US layout and wanted to make sure the rules wouldn't conflict with it.

Thanks for the feeback! Great to hear that this was useful for you.

[pipwilson]

Thanks for this - my first time on a mac with an external windows keyboard and couldn't crack the karabiner config - yours worked perfectly first time!