Plugging a PC keyboard to a Mac

6ix Passions is edited by Jean-Philippe Cyr,
a freelance user experience strategist.

He lives in Montreal, Magog and St. Martin, likes good foods and wines, cooking, travelling, movies, tv series and outdoor. He plays with his iPhone and browses the Web with his enhanced Firefox on a Mac.

ads by Yoggrt

Welcome in his (6 times) passionate world. ----------------

Say hi@jpcyr.com.

You should follow JiPé by RSS or Twitter.

Plugging a PC keyboard to a Mac

Needless to say that the action of plugging a PC keyboard to a Mac it’s an easy thing to do. If OS X cannot recognize the keyboard right away, you will need to specify by pressing two keys what type QWERTY OR AZERTY is the keyboard.

But when you have an irregular keyboard like mine a Goldtouch ergonomic ajustable keyboard (if you are interested, they finally made one for Mac, but I still don’t find the keys configuration optimal) or simply when the keys are organized in a non-natural way for a Mac User or a PC-Windows to Mac-OS X switcher like me, than you need to find a solution to accomodate yourself and get the best of your keyboard to stay productive.

Being a PC-Windows user for more than 10 years and to match my PC keyboard configuration, I begun by switching the Command key with the Control key in the Keyboard & Mouse Preferences Panel. The Windows key where the Command key is originaly asign on a PC keyboard is generally not at the right place, plus it’s really hard to change years of practice with the Control+C and Control+V shortcuts.
Then I install Keyboard Mastro to configure the sound control shortcuts on my PC keyboard. I asign the key Control+Option+PageUP to increase the sound and Control+Option+PageDown to decrease the sound level. I also define a shortcut to open the CD-ROM Tray and very other useful shortcuts to switch tunes in iTunes, paste a selecting in the last application with a simple keys combination. The possibilities are endless.

Parallels Users
For Paralles users I suggest not to used the remapping preferences of Parralles to switch back the Command and Control keys (If you have decide to follow my advice regarding the step 1). The remapping is to slow and sometime a simple copy-paste will not work. I suggest you used the free AutoHotkey to switch back the keys. As it is not so easy to understand how to configure it, I made a .exe file that will switch the keys for you. Just dowload it here and place an alias in your Windows Startup Folder.

Let me know how it goes…

Comments (View)