El Tramo

Mac OS X comes bundled with a wide variety of built-in international keyboard layouts. One tiny detail is that all of these layouts are for Apple keyboards only, and that these layouts deviate quite a lot from the standard keyboard layouts of countries such as Belgium. The main difference is that signs such as the @ and # are accessed using AltGr, which is not so on Apple keyboards (where they reside on totally different keys). This turns out to be very frustrating, making the whole `Bring your own Display, Keyboard and Mouse’ slogan of the Mac Mini total nonsense (unless you add `as long as it is made by us’. As far as i can tell, the only thing you can do about it is roll your own default keyboard layout and install and use that one. I guess we should be happy we can at least do that.

Download & Install instructions

1. Download Belgian (Non-Apple).keylayout. For people who want to check changes, you can also access it as a Git repo using
   

   git clone git://el-tramo.be/be-non-apple

2. Place the downloaded file in /Library/Keyboard Layouts or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts.
3. Log out and back in.
4. From the Input Menu in the International preference pane, there should now be a layoutcalled Belgian (Non-Apple). Select it, and you should be good.

Making it the default is another one of those frustrating stories. In my case, the keyboard sometimes jumped back to the default layout. Disabling the default keyboard was impossible since the checkbox was greyed out and unaccessible. I still haven’t found how to solve this, so i just moved the whole Roman.bundle out of the System library and put it where Mac OS can’t find it. This seems to do the trick, though.

TODO

Make some kind of icon for it, preferably different than the default Belgian flag from Mac OS X.