Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

Re-map the apple key for Windows under Parallels | 4 Comments

Posted in Apple on 31st July 2006, 11:16 pm by

A big annoyance when using windows under Parallels for browser testing is that if you are using an apple keyboard you will find that the apple key, which as an apple user you are used to using for copying and pasting, is now mapped to the windows key. This is particularly irritating as you often want to copy and paste urls to test and everytime you go into parallels you have to remember to use Ctrl+v instead of Apple+v etc.

I was looking for a way to fix the apple key issue when I came across a post by Eric Brodeur who was looking for a solution to re-map an apple keyboard for use with Bootcamp. I took his method of using the freeware program keytweak to achieve a suitable re-mapping.

First I went into windows via Parallels and after installing KeyTweak, I used KeyTweak’s half-teaching tool to capture the keycode of the apple key which I then used to map the apple key to left-control. A swift reboot and I can now happily use Apple+C and Apple+v to cut paste. Life is good!

For convenience you can download my apple key re-mapping here which should in theory work fine for all apple keyboards. Just drop it across to you windows virtualisation via a parallels share, or download direct from this site in your windows installation.

Lastly if you have a uk install of windows you will find that the location of @ and the quotes keys is messed up. Now this problem is easy to resolve, just set your keyboard layout to the US keyboard in windows and the layout will more closely match the apple layout.

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  • Remco Wendt

    Thanks! This quick solution made my mac->windows->mac copy/pasting life a whole lot easier :)

    Remco

  • Adam Khan

    Thanks a whole bundle. Right now I must use Windows quite frequently and this becomes a quality-of-life issue!

  • http://www.diggum.com Deanna

    I just began using Synergy between my imac & pc & I’m having a heck of a time figuring out shortcuts! I kept trying over & over using keytweak before I figured out that it doesn’t work on Win95 & that’s all I can run on the company controlled pc. (boo)

    Any suggestions for Win95?

  • Michael

    Thanks so much!! Youre a champ.. This has been the cause of my anger for the past week and a half.

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found|(3)

When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

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