Once you see this palette, start tapping each of the shift modifiers on your keyboard, including the Control, Alt and Windows keys. Choose Flag-Menu (U.S.) > Show Keyboard Viewer to open the floating keyboard panel.Yours may vary based on your International settings. This creates a flag-emblem item in your menu bar. At the very bottom of the settings pane, check Show Input menu in menu bar.This option appears in the first group, toward the top of the settings pane. Open System Preferences > International > Input Menu and enable the Keyboard Viewer.They'll show you which physical key matches which logical key. To find this out, take the following steps. When remapping keys, you'll first want to see how the original configuration is mapped. Whether or not the keyboard layout 'makes sense,' you'll want to know how keys are being interpreted by OS X and maybe make some changes to have them behave better with your touch-typing skills. As a rule, notebooks have pretty good layouts netbooks (their smaller brothers) do not. Larger notebooks and desktop systems use a more standard layout with the left and right sides mirrored. Obviously this configuration varies by laptop.Īlthough this layout is uniquely awful, it's not extremely common. From a Mac OS X point of view, this is less than ideal the Alt key (which appears on both sides) is the best candidate for use as the Command key. On the right, there's Alt, the quote key, and then three arrows. On the left side, there's the control key, a function key, the Windows key, and then the Alt (option) key. Other than that, it offers typical keys, including the Alt and Windows items near the space bar. It's unusual only in how extreme its OS X-unfriendly layout is. The following mini tutorial will show you how to identify keyboard mappings and, if needed, switch around those mappings so you can touch type on that keyboard with familiar shift-modifier placements. Should you find yourself in such a situation, one of the first things you need to deal with is the lack of a standard Command key. There are times when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune lead OS X users into using Windows keyboards.

Map key to left click mac