How to remap a mac keyboard for Windows usage?

April 15, 2010 1:41 PM

I am using the slim, aluminum Apple Bluetooth Keyboard on my Windows XP computer. It works fine for typing, but I need to change / re-map a few of the keys to their windows xp equivalents and need your help. Here's a link to the keyboard I'm referring to: Link

For example, I need the eject key (in the upper right hand corner) of the keyboard to be the Windows "Delete" key so I can hit "Control Alt Delete" to log in to my Windows machine (I currently cannot do this as no key is mapped to the windows "Delete" equivalent). I also need to re-map the right side "Command" key to be a "Control" key.

Here are the 2 keys (circled in red) that I need to re-map: Link

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Let me know if you need more information from me.

Thanks!

posted by WhereAmI to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Personally I use AutoHotkey for my keyboard remapping on Windows. It's really easy to do with AH, you just put [OldKey]::[NewKey] in your script file and remaps them. The one problem you still have with that is not knowing what key your Eject button is being mapped to now, so that you can remap it.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:47 PM on April 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

I did some more searching on it, and it looks like the Eject key is one of those nonstandard keys that are difficult to map with most of the common remapping methods. One person on the AutoHotkey forum said they were able to use this method to remap the Eject key though.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:56 PM on April 15, 2010

Thanks burn! I'll try it out now :)
posted by thankyoumuchly at 1:59 PM on April 15, 2010

KeyTweak makes remapping relatively painless. Note that the new mappings will apply to all users of the computer - that's a feature of using Windows' registry.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 2:22 PM on April 15, 2010

This is only a partial solution, but Fn + Backspace should be equivalent to Delete.
posted by SemiSophos at 2:52 PM on April 15, 2010

I came in to recommend the awesome AutoHotkey, too - and if that method linked above doesn't work for you, TruncatedTiller, it's relatively easy to detect the hexcode of your mystery key using the method described under "Special Keys" here. Once you have that hexcode, it's trivially easy to remap the key.

The benefit of using AutoHotkey to do this (rather than hard registry coding, or scripted registry changes using something like KeyTweak) is that it's relatively impermanent and easy to switch back from if you change keyboards. That's also the drawback, of course - you may want something a little more hardwired, depending on whether you're likely ever to change your keyboard. With AutoHotkey, you could make it more automatic by compiling the script and setting it to run at startup - but you can just run the script manually every time if you want, too.
posted by koeselitz at 3:24 PM on April 15, 2010

some of this has already been done by the UAWKS project

from their site "Unofficial Apple Wireless Keyboard Support (UAWKS) is a small package that allows Windows users to make full use of Apple's uber-sexy bluetooth keyboard. Most importantly, it provides support for essential keys that don't work out of the box"
posted by alchemist at 8:05 AM on April 16, 2010 [1 favorite]