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I have a Mac and using it with an external keyboard.

I know that whenever you connect a new keyboard, OS X asks you to detect a keyboard layout by pushing a few keys, and very same thing can be done via Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard > Change Keyboard Type... button.

Somehow my OS X forgets the layout settings whenever it reboots, and asks me to set the layout again. Also, I would like it to stick with one layout for whatever keyboard it gets.

Is there any simple way to achieve this? I am feeling that there should be either:

  • A console command to do the same thing that UI does, or
  • An underlying function call to either the kernel or some driver, which the Keyboard.prefPane uses.

Thank you guys in advance.

Hongweng
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1 Answers1

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WARNING: I experienced some macOS crashes after doing what is described below. Pressing any key on the external keyboard crashed my MacBook. I recovered by (sudo) deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist.

While you might need to logout/reboot for this to have any effect, you can write a value to the entry corresponding to your keyboard in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist using defaults. I believe a value of 41 represents ISO.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist keyboardtype -dict-add "49948-1133-0" 41

Find out which dictionary key you need to change by finding the vendor and product IDs for your keyboard:

ioreg -p IOUSB -c IOUSBDevice | grep -e class -e idVendor -e idProduct

P.S. I noticed the Change Keyboard Type button doesn't always appear. Sometimes it will after re-plugging the keyboard, sometimes it won't. And even then changing the type won't have any effect.

Brecht Machiels
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