Category Archives: likes and dislikes

Real Mac UK Keyboard Layout

Edit: Oct 2013

Rejoice! OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” now provides a keyboard layout called “British – PC” which faithfully maps a real UK keyboard (so far as five minutes’ examination has shown) onto the Mac (so long as caps lock is not engaged).

Original article (for OS X upto 10.8 “Mountain Lion”):

I hate the Apple UK keyboard layout. I detest it. Defensible as it may be to enhance cross-Atlantic keyboard familiarity, and rational as it might be to place double-quote above single, I still cannot stand it. If I were a ‘switcher’, and had decreed that, from last March, only Apple computers were sufficiently worthy to be graced by my fingertips, I might have come to live with it but I object to having to remap my brain-finger pathways every time I move from one platform to another (remembering which clipboard / paste buffer to use is struggle enough).

All this is an elaborate way of saying that I’ve made a set of truly UK-compatible keyboard layouts for my MacBook Pro and the standard UK USB keyboard I sometimes plug into it. These layouts work for 10.5 “Leopard” and possibly others. They can be found by in my RealUKKeyboardLayouts.zip file.

In this zip file you’ll find the two layouts and two similarly-named .icns files which allow you to identify the layouts at a glance. They’re not very pretty but they do the job.

Unzip the archive and, for each user who wants to “type proper” again, place the files in ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ (creating the directory if required). Log out and back in to allow Mac OS to discover the new layouts (supposedly /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ can be used for system-wide layouts, but this was not the case on my first attempt and, as I’m the only user of my laptop who cares about such things, I didn’t delve further).

Now open the “International” Preference Pane. On the “input menu” tab, check “Show input menu in menu bar”. You’ll need this because, just occasionally, Leopard will switch you back to a system ‘blessed’ layout and you’ll spend hours cursing your mistaken “@”s until you figure out what’s happened. Now scroll through the keyboard layouts and check “Real UK” and “Real UK – IBM/PC” to allow these layouts to be selected from the input menu.

Close the preference pane, select the appropriate layout from the menu bar, and that’s it.

Oh yes: in case you were wondering, these layouts were created with the eccentric but indispensible Ukelele which guides you through the entire process. This will be particularly useful if you want a layout for a keyboard other than my provided MacBook Pro or IBM/PC layouts.