I recently tried installing Double Command in Mac OS X to remap some of my key-board keys. The reason I needed this is because I was using a PC style keyboard (dont ask me why, its a very long story :-) ) on Mac and I want Home and End keys to work as it used to be in Windows. Enough of the back ground, now the technical stuff..
I initially assumed it as an application and happily installed it by double clicking the package inside the .dmg file. After successful installation, I searched for Double Command shortcut inside Applications and Dock. Well.. couldn't find it. Repeated the process , same result. I did a bit of googling and couldn't find anything. Then I went to the help section of http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/help.html and there it was..
Double Command is not an application.. it is a kernel extension.. This is one thing that new Mac users from windows background must get used to. Kernel extensions are dynamic piece of code you add to OS to change the way it behaves. I think we can compare this to device drivers in Windows (I am purely guessing here). Double Command adds a preference pane ( a nice user interface) to System Preferences. All you have to do is to open up System Preferences and you can now see a Double Command icon. Double click on the icon to open up Preference Pane. You can tick/untick the mappings you want and it works straight away..
Few things worth noting: The preference pane has fixed set of mappings that lets you remap certain key to certain other keys. You cannot specify a key and remap to some-other one. For example, Double Command does not allow you to map the key A to B and B to A. Their help page suggests to have a look at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2056.html for doing such things
I hope to spend some time today remapping the Windows key to Command key. At the moment Alt Key is mapped with Command key. Lets see how it goes. Hopefully I wont spend too much time on this.
I initially assumed it as an application and happily installed it by double clicking the package inside the .dmg file. After successful installation, I searched for Double Command shortcut inside Applications and Dock. Well.. couldn't find it. Repeated the process , same result. I did a bit of googling and couldn't find anything. Then I went to the help section of http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/help.html and there it was..
Double Command is not an application.. it is a kernel extension.. This is one thing that new Mac users from windows background must get used to. Kernel extensions are dynamic piece of code you add to OS to change the way it behaves. I think we can compare this to device drivers in Windows (I am purely guessing here). Double Command adds a preference pane ( a nice user interface) to System Preferences. All you have to do is to open up System Preferences and you can now see a Double Command icon. Double click on the icon to open up Preference Pane. You can tick/untick the mappings you want and it works straight away..
Few things worth noting: The preference pane has fixed set of mappings that lets you remap certain key to certain other keys. You cannot specify a key and remap to some-other one. For example, Double Command does not allow you to map the key A to B and B to A. Their help page suggests to have a look at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2056.html for doing such things
I hope to spend some time today remapping the Windows key to Command key. At the moment Alt Key is mapped with Command key. Lets see how it goes. Hopefully I wont spend too much time on this.
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