Jai Shri Ram!

Fixing the keyboard on a hackintosh

I installed iAtkos L2 on my Acer 5742G laptop and it works really well, there was one thing that has been bugging me. I couldn’t press ~ on the keyboard and using the terminal was painful when it came to specifying paths relative to my home directory.

After some looking around I found this application KeyRemap4MacBook. As the name suggests it allows us to remap keys on the keyboard and assign them different functions. The problem I had was that I got § instead of the usual backquote(`). Here’s the relevant xml snippet that performs the desired conversion

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>Fix Tilde</name>
<identifier>private.fix_tilde</identifier>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::UK_SECTION, KeyCode::BACKQUOTE</autogen>
</item>
</root>

 

The best part about this is that it’s an open source project. I didn’t know about the keycodes and had problem finding the ones that I needed, so I asked by opening an issue on github and the author took the time out to help me. I absolutely love the open source community. Hopefully this will help someone else who had a similar issue. This application can also be useful for those who have keyboards with multimedia keys that don’t work out of the box for hackintoshes.

This project is maintained by nikhilbhardwaj