If you’re a hacker, developer or a sysadmin, and you work with a non-US keyboard layout, you’ve probably been annoyed a time or two that the tilde ~ character is so hard to hit. On a Finnish keyboard, it’s behind Alt + ¨ after which you need to press the space bar unless a the next character with a tilde on it doesn’t exist. So Alt+¨ Space a if you want to type ~a.
If you’re on a Mac, i’ve got help for you.
- Download the Ukelele keyboard remapping app from Sil.org. Extract and optionally add to your Applications folder.
- Choose
File>New from Current Input Source - Click the paragraph
§key, because that’s the one we’re going to re-map. Or pick another key you want begone. - Give your layout a name:
Keyboard>Set Keyboard Name...to distinguish it from the original one. - Optional syntactic sugar:
Keyboard>Attach Icon File. Re-purpose an icon from the Ukelele example keyboard layout folder. - Save the keyboard layout file to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/
- Open
System Preferences>Keyboard>Keyboard>Input Sources(OSX 10.8). Locate and tick your newly saved and named Layout. - Choose your new layout from the icon close to the clock at the top menu bar.
- Profit!
There are several nice things about this method. You can share your keyboard layout with your peers. You can go wild and re-map any normal key that you like. And you can always go back to normality in case your re-mapping went a little too wild :)
