Input Remapper

Get your Mac keyboard to cooperate with Windows, without any ugly registry hacks.

So, you’ve got an Intel based Mac and you’re happily dual booting into Windows (or triple booting into Linux). Be honest, we know you miss some the functionality of OS X. Well, we know a tool that can help you with that.

Under Mac OS X, the function keys control some of the most used system properties such as volume, brightness and exposé. In Windows however, the function keys are tied to programs. Because of the way Windows interprets and responds to keystrokes, you can use the registry to remap your function keys to keyboard commands that are similar to the ones used in Mac OS X. Things like ejecting discs, volume control and a key-based right mouse button.

Gamers have been doing tricks like this for years. Using the registry, they remove their computer’s reaction to the Windows key, so if they press it accidentally the game isn’t minimised. Instead of not responding, you can edit the registry to react to a command from the keyboard with any type-able key, and even some that you can’t type directly, such as ©, ú, and shortcuts that you find on multimedia keyboards.

Windows keyboard management does the same thing when you select a Dvorak layout, or a non-English keyboard. If you feel up to the task of hunting down the required strings, you can enter keyboard overrides manually through the registry editor. To save you the hassle you can use GUI enabled programs to remap keys in Windows. But if you are using Mac hardware, there’s a little tool called Input Remapper that does this with the Mac’s standardised hardware taken into account.


It even uses the Fn key on the Mac Book and Mac Book Pro, which like all laptops, transposes the keys in the keyboard’s hardware. This means that unlike the shift key, it is transparent to Windows, and you’d have to dig into the hardware layer if you wanted to use it in conjunction with other keys. Input Remapper does this by checking packets from the keyboard to see when the Fn key is pressed. When it is, the subsequent keystrokes are diverted to the program, which generates preset commands and sends them to Windows to execute.

It makes using Windows on a Mac much less cumbersome. Even though it’s still in development and not even at version 1.0 yet, it works well and looks promising.