OS X Catalina "<" and "^" keys are swapped

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Level 1

4 points

OS X Catalina "<" and "^" keys are swapped

Dear Community - I use an Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (German QWERTZ layout) as an external keyboard for my Mac Book Pro running Catalina 10.15.5. A few days ago two keys ("<" and "^") have been swapped. I don't know why, I don't know how, but I found a Post on another forum which described the exact same problem (but using another keyboard), but I don't want to install separate software to solve a bug. You can read about it here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/239395/and-keys-are-swapped

Does anyone know how to fix this? Or does anyone experience the same problem?

In the keyboard Panel everything looks right:

But when chosing the input source I can already see that the layout is wrong.

I am thankful for every advice.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 8, 2020 1:59 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,526 points

Jul 8, 2020 2:25 AM in response to marbleDE

It looks like your machine thinks the keyboard is the ANSI (US) type, with no letter key to the left of y, instead of the ISO (European) type. Some possible fixes are at

https://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2009/12/fixing-keyboard-type-problems.html

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Answer 2

marbleDE Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 8, 2020 7:57 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

The help on the blog post you sent is outdated and didn't work. I had the exact same effect as the guy that posted the following "This is still an issue in 2019 with Mojave 10.14.6. In my case, using a Logitech K810 UK layout keyboard, the type gets set to ANSI, the Change Keyboard Type button has disappeared, and running Keyboard Setup Assistant from command line gets the error "No unknown keyboard connected - terminating" instead of running the Assistant.

Fortunately installing Karabiner Elements from https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ then running it triggered the Assistant and I could resolve the problem. Hopefully that will work long term. Hope this helps others who find there way to this very useful blog post!"

Except that I am using a Apple Keyboard which used to work until 2 days ago.

It works fine with Karabiner Software running in the background, but I don't want to grant a thrid party app access / privileges to my input source. I'd rather live with the error instead. Thank you very much for your help anyway!

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Answer 3

marbleDE Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 8, 2020 8:50 AM in response to marbleDE

Fun Fact: Using a virtual machine running windows on top of OS X everything is fine. So windows is better in recognizing an apple keyboard than osx is. If someone knows an exact solution without installing any additional tools that require privileges to track your input please let me know.

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OS X Catalina "<" and "^" keys are swapped

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