Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Just use any normal keyboard. Do nothing at all to configure the layout on Linux, and on Mac, configure the OS to swap the command and option keys for that keyboard.

View on HN

I'm glad I'm not the only one who had that jump out to them. I don't think I've ever had any OS specific functionality with a keyboard. Looking at the USB HID scan code list I can't even think what I'd want out of a keyboard that isn't already covered.

The built-in macOS functionality for remapping modifier keys so that 'PC' keyboards behave as expected in macOS is relatively new, so maybe longstanding macOS users are less aware of it. But third party apps did have the capability to retrofit that into macOS before Apple added that feature, as well.

I am a longstanding Mac OS X user that wishes Linux had an easy way to remap modifier keys. For now, I've settled on having keyd installed:

  /etc/keyd/default.conf

  [ids]

  *

  [main]

  leftalt = layer(control)
  leftcontrol = layer(alt)

With AutoKey, I can swap Alt and Ctrl keys for Terminal apps and make my remapped ⌘C and ⌘V work as I expect.

I wish I could remap keys in a universal way to be macOS-like on Linux, because it's really nice to be able to have GNU readline-like shortcuts and CUA-like shortcuts at the same time in every text field. Just swapping the modifiers doesn't feel worth doing in my case since I don't really have a muscle memory problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com