This is the README for keyboardfix.s.tar.gz [Download] [Browse] [Up]
How to (sort of) fix your new style keyboard. Like every other Unix literate person with a new style Next keyboard, I quickly became exasperated with the placement of the |, \ and ` keys. No problem, thought I, I'll just fire up the Keyboard demo application and remap those keys to the main keyboard, where they belong. Hmmm, where shall I place them? How about putting \ on shift-return and | on shift- delete. I don't use these combinations and this would approximate the nice positioning of the old style keyboard. As an afterthought, why not put ` on shift-tab (just because it's the only non-used shift key left). But nooooo, Keyboard doesn't let you change shift-return, or shift-delete. No problem, thought I, I'll just check the documentation and munge the keymappings directly (I spent too much time the Macintosh world before upgrading to my Next :-). But nooooo, there isn't any documentation (at least not online that I could find). So, this rather ugly hack was born after staring at a hex dump of a keymap to reverse engineer it. It searches for a string it recognizes and alters the keymap to do what I wanted. Enclosed is source to the keymap munging program and a "fixed" keymapping that has shift-return set to produce \, shift-delete to produce | and shift-tab to produce `. This is for the sake of those people without a compiler. Please read the comments at the head of the code for more details. To install it, copy it to ~/Library/Keyboards, /LocalLibrary/Keyboards or /NextLibrary/Keyboards, quit and restart Preferences, select the new keymapping and you're all set. Give it a try, I've found it makes the new keyboard quite tolerable. P.S. To answer one question I've already gotten a couple of times: no, I don't know how to disable or remap the brightness, sound or power keys. I suspect that they may be in the keymapping, but I did not completely decipher the keymapping format, and just don't know if they are in there or not. cheers, --mike (carlton@cs.berkeley.edu)
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.