After browsing too much r/MechanicalKeyboards I bought some more keyboards… 😀

One is a white TKL CODE with 65g Zealios switches
(which is essentially the same as my current WASDv2 except for the case color, switches and lighting), which I bought because I was interested in the Zealios switches, and this is one of the few pre-made keyboards that offer them.

The other was a birthday present to myself and is a Leopold FC660C (Topre) in Grey & Blue:The Leopold does not have a Mac specific mode (although you can use its DIP switches to swap the Windows and Alt key, but that doesn’t get you ⌘ to the right of the space bar).

Therefore I fiddled a bit with remapping some keys for these keyboards for macOS use. One option for the Leopold FC660C is Hasu’s Alt Controller which replaces the controller board itself with a fully programmable one. Another option is to use Karabiner to remap the keys at the software level, but I found the CPU usage of Karabiner’s karabiner_grabber process a bit too high for what it should be doing. Since macOS 10.12 there’s another way to remap keys using hidutil.

My configuration (for both keyboards) looks as follows (stored inside ~/bin/remap.sh which is run on login, based on this script):

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2450/_index.html
# https://opensource.apple.com/source/IOHIDFamily/IOHIDFamily-1035.41.2/IOHIDFamily/IOHIDUsageTables.h.auto.html
# https://opensource.apple.com/source/IOHIDFamily/IOHIDFamily-1035.41.2/IOHIDFamily/AppleHIDUsageTables.h.auto.html
FROM="\"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc\""
TO="\"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst\""

ESCAPE="0x700000029"
CAPS_LOCK="0x700000039"

PRINT_SCREEN="0x700000046"
SCROLL_LOCK="0x700000047"
PAUSE="0x700000048"
INSERT="0x700000049"

F13="0x700000068"
F14="0x700000069"
F15="0x70000006A"

LEFT_ALT="0x7000000E2"
LEFT_GUI="0x7000000E3"
RIGHT_CTRL="0x7000000E4"
RIGHT_ALT="0x7000000E6"
RIGHT_GUI="0x7000000E7"
PC_MENU="0x700000065"

MEDIA_PLAY="0xC000000B0"
MEDIA_NEXT="0xC000000B5"
MEDIA_PREV="0xC000000B6"
MEDIA_EJECT="0xC000000B8"

# WASDv2 / CODE in Mac mode
hidutil property --matching '{"ProductID":0x269, "VendorID":0x4d9}' --set "{\"UserKeyMapping\":[
{$FROM: $CAPS_LOCK,    $TO: $ESCAPE},
{$FROM: $INSERT,       $TO: $MEDIA_PLAY},
{$FROM: $F13,          $TO: $MEDIA_EJECT},
{$FROM: $F14,          $TO: $MEDIA_PREV},
{$FROM: $F15,          $TO: $MEDIA_NEXT},
]}"
# Leopold FC660C
hidutil property --matching '{"ProductID":0x134, "VendorID":0x853}' --set "{\"UserKeyMapping\":[
{$FROM: $CAPS_LOCK,    $TO: $ESCAPE},
{$FROM: $LEFT_GUI,     $TO: $LEFT_ALT},
{$FROM: $LEFT_ALT,     $TO: $LEFT_GUI},
{$FROM: $RIGHT_ALT,    $TO: $RIGHT_GUI},
{$FROM: $RIGHT_CTRL,   $TO: $RIGHT_ALT},
{$FROM: $PC_MENU,      $TO: $RIGHT_CTRL},
{$FROM: $INSERT,       $TO: $MEDIA_PLAY},
{$FROM: $PRINT_SCREEN, $TO: $MEDIA_EJECT},
{$FROM: $SCROLL_LOCK,  $TO: $MEDIA_PREV},
{$FROM: $PAUSE,        $TO: $MEDIA_NEXT},
]}"

Mainly this maps the modifier keys to be more Mac-like, caps lock to escape (which means I can run the Leopold’s escape key permanently in ` / ~ mode (using Fn + Q), as well as some media keys. The links in the header-comment of the script contain lists of supported pages and usages; the page is the upper 32-bit word and the usage the lower 32-bit word.

If you want to run this on login, you can use launchd by storing a plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/de.maven.remap_keys.plist for example containing

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>de.maven.remap_keys</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array><string>/Users/maven/bin/remap.sh</string></array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Happy hacking!

Some house-keeping: The domain should now be available over https. This is not true for log0.org which now just redirects back here (instead of serving the same content over there).

And we have a release (which is fairly untested, but it works for me). This is first time I’ve released something post-Gatekeeper, so I hope I signed all the things correctly. Also the first time I’ve attempted an installer.

I’ve redone the synchronisation between the input and output thread about 5 times now, let’s hope this variant works out. It’s easy if you don’t care about latency, but trying to get that as low as possible without glitching and staying real-time is quite hard. By default, only AC3 encoding is enabled as DTS support in libavcodec is only experimental. EAC3 seems to distribute packets over multiple SPDIF frames, and thus seems to be a bad choice due to further increased latency.

Diablo 3 sounds quite different with 5.1 sound for example, as the different screen corners map to in front or behind your character (and thus the listener) due to the isometric perspective.

Report any issues or suggestions on the GitHub page. Happy multi-channel audio-ing! 🙂