Mac Boot Camp: fixed positions of Alt, Windows and Ctrl keys

[Home] [Purchase] [Download] [Manual] [Acknowledgements] [Sitemap] [Release Notes] [FAQ]

[ Up ] [ Swapping Caps Lock and Ctrl ] [ Disabling the WINDOWS key ] [ Mapping multimedia/web keys to numeric keypad ] [ Assigning characters to multimedia/web keys ] [ Multi-lingual English/French keyboard ] [ Multi-alphabet Serbian Cyrillic/Latin keyboard ] [ Tri-lingual Serbian Cyrillic / Latin / Greek keyboard ] [ Replacing AltGR with Kana ] [ French improved keyboard ] [ Multi-lingual Russian phonetic / US English keyboard ] [ Multi-lingual Bulgarian phonetic / US English keyboard ] [ Colemak keyboard ] [ Multi-lingual Hindi / US English keyboard ] [ Multi-lingual Hebrew / US English keyboard ] [ French multilingual keyboard ] [ Emulating Compose key using chained dead keys ] [ US English with all Latin accents using chained dead keys ] [ Mac Boot Camp: fixed positions of Alt, Windows and Ctrl keys ] [ Using NLS functions to simulate the "Context menu" key ] [ Using NLS functions to make Caps Lock and Alt Gr share the same key ] [ Using NLS functions to simulate togglable ROYA/LOYA modifier keys ] [ Sanskrit keyboard with Vedic extensions ]

Example - Mac Boot Camp: fixed positions of Alt, Windows and Ctrl keys

Layout files: US MBP Swapped Alt and Win.zip , US MBP Swapped Alt and Win with right Ctrl.zip

You can use the free Demo version to test and preview this layout. A Premium, Personal or Lite edition is needed for deploying it.

Swapping the Alt and Windows keys

For users who have installed Windows on an Apple Mac computer via Boot Camp, the placement of Windows and Alt keys is a source of recurring annoyance: these keys are mapped to Mac's Command and Option keys respectively, meaning that their position is inverted relative to where they are found on standard Windows keyboards:

Fortunately, this anomaly is easy to fix with KbdEdit. Following is a step-by-step guide to applying the necessary customisations:

Switch to the Low-level editor.
Move the mouse to the LAlt key (Left Alt, immediately to the left of the space bar), drag it, and drop it onto the LWin key.
This will result in the swapping of VK mappings of the two keys.
Important: do not hold the Ctrl key during the drag-drop operation - this ensures that dropping executes the desired move, ie swap operation.
Now do the same to swap the RAlt and RWin keys.

With these customisations, the Alt and Win keys are now mapped to the expected physical positions:

The ready-made layout file US MBP Swapped Alt and Win.zip contains these customisations applied against the standard US English layout.

Adding the right Ctrl key

Fixing the positions of Alt and Win keys is a step in the right direction, but the customised layout still lacks the right Ctrl key, which can be an impediment in typical Windows applications, which rely heavily on Ctrl-based UI shortcuts.

This defficiency can be easily fixed by converting the right Win key from the previous example to right Ctrl:

The starting point is assumed to be the layout where Win and Alt keys have already been swapped.
Switch to the Low-level editor.
Select the RWin key (immediately to the right of the space bar). This is the key that was originally mapped to RAlt in the "vanilla" layout. To make sure you have selected the correct key, the "Scan code" field should be showing 0x38 ext.
Now choose VK_RCONTROL trom the Assigned virtual code drop-down.
- or, alternatively -
Drag the RCtrl key, and drop it onto the RWin ie 0x38 ext key while holding down the Ctrl key on your physical keyboard.

The resulting layout now has the Control key mapped to the physical Right Option Mac key:

The ready-made layout file US MBP Swapped Alt and Win with right Ctrl.zip contains these customisations applied against the standard US English layout.

Manual index