Think Same: Mapping An Apple Keyboard Like It’s A Normal One

The aluminium “laptop-style” Apple keyboards are really nice: quick and easy to type on. I’ve got one on my main Linux machine. But they’re mapped oddly (or at least the UK one is): backtick is next to Z, and backslash next to Enter. As I’m usually watching the screen and not the keyboard while typing, the fact that these think-different mappings are borne out by the printing on the keycaps doesn’t help.

So I needed to swap them back again. And, X being the stovepipe it is, I needed to do it twice, once for inside X (including Gnome and KDE) and once for the console.

X was actually easier: I added this to ~/.xinitrc:

# Apple silver keyboard has these keycodes swapped
xmodmap -e "keycode 94 = grave notsign grave notsign bar bar"
xmodmap -e "keycode 49 = backslash bar backslash bar bar brokenbar"

For console use there doesn’t seem to be a similar way of modifying just certain keycodes, so you end up needing to make a whole new keymap:

dumpkeys > keymap.txt
(edit keymap.txt)
loadkeys < keymap.txt

Here’s the diff I had to apply to the standard UK map to get the Apple keyboard working the way my fingers expect:

--- std_keymap  2010-03-12 13:49:34.000000000 +0000
+++ silverapple.keymap  2010-03-12 13:50:39.000000000 +0000
@@ -93,9 +93,9 @@
        shift   control keycode  40 = nul             
        alt     keycode  40 = Meta_apostrophe 
        shift   alt     keycode  40 = Meta_at         
-keycode  41 = grave            notsign          bar              nul             
-       alt     keycode  41 = Meta_grave      
-       control alt     keycode  41 = Meta_nul        
+keycode  86 = grave            notsign          bar              nul             
+       alt     keycode  86 = Meta_grave      
+       control alt     keycode  86 = Meta_nul        
 keycode  42 = Shift           
 keycode  43 = numbersign       asciitilde      
        control keycode  43 = Control_backslash
@@ -201,10 +201,10 @@
        control alt     keycode  83 = Boot            
 keycode  84 = Last_Console    
 keycode  85 =
-keycode  86 = backslash        bar              bar              Control_backslash
-       alt     keycode  86 = Meta_backslash  
-       shift   alt     keycode  86 = Meta_bar        
-       control alt     keycode  86 = Meta_Control_backslash
+keycode  41 = backslash        bar              bar              Control_backslash
+       alt     keycode  41 = Meta_backslash  
+       shift   alt     keycode  41 = Meta_bar        
+       control alt     keycode  41 = Meta_Control_backslash
 keycode  87 = F11              F23              Console_23       F35             
        alt     keycode  87 = Console_11      
        control alt     keycode  87 = Console_11

And to get this loaded on every boot, I stuck it in /etc/rc.local:

# Apple keyboards start up in "F-keys are magic" mode; this puts them in
# "F-keys are F-keys" mode
echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode

# Also they have the backslash and backtick keys swapped
loadkeys < /etc/silverapple.keymap

Oh, right, yes, the function keys: they think different too, or at least they default to think-different mode on power-up. To get them thinking same, you need to have the Linux hid_apple module loaded, and to set its “fnmode” parameter as above. (Other systems may use other ways of setting module parameters.)

If you’ve found this and want to check that your fingers are mapped the same way mine are, this is the list of keys that, with the setup above, do not generate the symbol printed on the keycap:

labelled	generates
§	` (backtick)
± (shift-§)	¬ (notsign)
@ (shift-2)	"
" (shift-')	@
\	#
| (shift-\)	~
` (backtick)	\
~ (shift-`)	|

Overall you lose the ability to type “§” and “±”, and gain “¬” (meh) and, rather surprisingly, the hash character “#”, which isn’t marked anywhere on the Apple keyboard.