Is there a Mac utility that will allow remapping of the entire keyboard?

January 18, 2006 11:23 AM

I've been looking for a one-hand keyboard. I've tried the Frogpad but the learning curve proved to be too high. I was looking for a solution that would essentially 'mirror' the right side of the keyboard to the keys on the left when a modifier key was pressed (the G key would be modified to H, F to J, etc.).

Lo and behold, I find the Matias Half Keyboard which is exactly what I was going to invent (dammit). But there must be a way to remap my existing keyboard to do exactly the same thing. All the utilites I've managed to find will allow remapping of funtion keys, shift, enter, etc. but not the letters or the space. Any ideas?

posted by DandyRandy to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If you want to roll your own, try AutoHotkey. I'm pretty sure the forums there have a half-keyboard script and if not it'd be easy to write one once you get the hang of it. (Matias has a patent on the half-keyboard thing so there are no legal third-party drivers that do it, really.)

Another alternative is to switch to a left-handed or right-handed Dvorak layout. Both of these are built into Windows and simply put the most frequently-used keys on the left or right side of the keyboard.
posted by kindall at 11:30 AM on January 18, 2006

Response by poster: AutoHotKey is perfect - for Windows. Is there something like that for a Mac?
posted by DandyRandy at 11:37 AM on January 18, 2006

Not really, you'd probably have to write it in C/C++.
posted by kindall at 11:55 AM on January 18, 2006

No, you certainly don't have to write your own *program* to do it. It's built into OSX.

There's a great keyboard layout generator here, but it seems to be gone at the moment (non-functional archive here).

Since that doesn't work, you can glean the XML format by looking at /System/Library/Keyboard Layouts/Unicode.bundle/Contents/Resources/*.keylayout, or read Apple's technote.

It looks like what you want to do can easily be done by figuring out which keycode is which letter, and remapping in one of the modifier key settings (say, option). Not that hard, but the layout generator would have made it really easy...

Once you write your own layout, place it in ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ and it should appear in your input menu (enable in System Preferences, International).
posted by easyasy3k at 2:44 PM on January 18, 2006

Ukelele Keyboard Layout Editor
posted by Sharcho at 5:33 PM on January 18, 2006

Response by poster: The keyboard generator tha easyasy3k pointed to is back and working now, and j-u-s-t about does the job, but leaves a couple of holes in the mapping, as well as disallowing my desired modifier key (space bar). Ukelele looks like it would have the same limitations.
posted by DandyRandy at 9:56 PM on January 18, 2006

According to this you can remap some of the modifier keys in Tiger, but unfortunately not the space bar. Remapping the Caps Lock to be your modifier instead of space makes it semi-usable.
posted by Sharcho at 12:36 AM on January 19, 2006

FYI, the reason that there are no good utilities to do this is that Matias has patented the half-QWERTY layout used by the half keyboard, and has been aggressive about protecting that patent.

On OS X, there used to be a third-party utility to do this (and other things) called uControl. The support was turned off several versions back, but could be reenabled if you mucked around with the source code. Send me an e-mail if this solution might work for you. According to the home page, though, uControl is no longer supported, and I don't know if it works in Tiger.

/frustrated one-handed typist
posted by shaun at 1:43 AM on January 19, 2006

I found a Half-QWERTY script for AutoHotKey
posted by Sharcho at 7:24 AM on July 25, 2006