Anz ideas_
September 28, 2008 10:05 PM   Subscribe

While talking to my friend, who was using gchat in gmail on a Mac, suddenly her keyboard started acting up. It didn't work it gchat, did work in rmails in gmail, and the kezboard is messed up for other things++ (y is swapped with z, and all sorts of other things.) The strange part is, she doesn't even know how she did it. Any Mac gurus have anz ideas_ (any ideas?) Particularly useful would be how to reverse the change...
posted by hAndrew to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
 
Best answer: She may have accidentally changed her keyboard layout to another language. Some other countries use slight variations of the qwerty theme that may make it appear that one or two letters are off.

The default shortcuts to switch between input devices (pre 10.4 or with spotlight disabled) are Command+Space and Command+Option+Space. Those are easy to accidentally mash.

Have her go into System Preferences - International - Input Menu to make sure the correct keyboard layout is selected.
posted by themadjuggler at 10:13 PM on September 28, 2008


Agree with themadjuggler. Sounds like the German layout, at least, y and z are switched between American and German layouts. What's surprising is, how little time it takes to get used to the change (living in Europe, I've had to use the German keyboards). What I have not done, is switching between the two on a regular basis.
posted by Goofyy at 10:17 PM on September 28, 2008


Response by poster: Thanks, that was correct!

And I had just asked her to press AppleKey+space for spotlight, and she's a windows person, so accidentally pressing Command+space seems very plausible.
posted by hAndrew at 10:18 PM on September 28, 2008


Best answer: No, she pressed the key you told her to. The Command key is the "Apple" key. Early Macs didn't have the apple on that key at all, and it is still properly referred to as the Command key. Current keyboards have the word "command" there along with the "cloverleaf" symbol and the silly apple.
posted by D.C. at 1:26 AM on September 29, 2008


(minor aside: at least the most recent rev of the apple keyboards doesn't have the apple symbol at all — just the cloverleaf and the word 'command'. My two year old Macbook Pro still has the Apple symbol, though.)
posted by heresiarch at 6:21 AM on September 29, 2008


Alternately, sometimes I whack "F6" which turns it into a number calculator ro something. It took me like a aolsid hour to find out the first time.
posted by GilloD at 6:38 AM on September 29, 2008


Response by poster: Ah it was the spotlight key; now I see, thanks D.C.
posted by hAndrew at 8:32 PM on September 29, 2008


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