Hacker News Reader

Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

Personally the biggest problem (outside the Ctrl/cmd c/v conflict) is that as a UK ISO user, Macs botched the key on the top left, next to the 1.

I subsequently have to set my Mac keyboard layout to PC to fix backticks and remove that key that is never used, and rely on my touch typing. It does also mean that no one will ever try to type on my laptop.

View on HN

This irks me also, more than I'd normally admit. A couple of solutions I discovered over the years; one is to use `hidutil property --set` from the command line for UserKeymappings to overwrite the non us backslash to the backtick (I can't remember the specific codes for the keys, but you can find them online), however, this was cumbersome when occasionally using an external keyboard (I prefer ISO over ANSI) or if you restart the machine.

Eventually I settled on Karabiner Elements, an app that lets you create a simple modification specifically to target the Mac internal keyboard where you can map `non_us_backslash` (that strange unused key) to `grave_accent_and_tilde` which fixes this.

I do the same. The British PC layout is relatively recent as well, since when I had a Mac in 2013 it didn't exist, and the keyboard layout was the main factor why I ditched it.

Back on Mac now with British PC and it's much less frustrating to use the keyboard. Plenty of other frustrations instead. I'd prefer to be on Linux but the hardware is just too good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com