achinoam01: Swap Command and Alt keys on USB keyboard

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Swap Command and Alt keys on USB keyboard

Today I ruined my silver Apple keyboard by spilling coffee on it and had to switch back to an old PC keyboard with a German layout. Which is a fine keyboard with one very annoying attribute: the Control (Windows) and Alt keys are swapped, the bottom keys are from left to right: Ctrl - Windows(Command) - Alt - Space. It can drive you crazy. So I searched for a solution but it was not as obvious as I had expected.

With Snow Leopard the mapping can be changed via System Preferences » Keyboard, there choose 'Modifier keys...' and in the Dialog remap Alt (Option) and Command. However, some applications, like Eclipse, do not get these changes.

So, I would like to swap the modifiers further down at the input driver level. There are descriptions how to modify AppleUSBKeyboard.kext. That seems to be outdated since I can not find AppleUSBKeyboard.kext on Snow Leopard (10.6.7) anymore. But looking at ...