AutoHotKey Mac Keyboard on Windows 8

I've been doing a lot of work on site recently on a MacBook Pro, and, although I resisted at first, I've grown very fond of the Mac keyboard experience (although this could be attributed to Stockholm Syndrome). At home however I still use my Dell Windows Desktop for most of my Windows/.NET development. However, to keep the keyboard experience similar between my MacBook and my Windows Desktop, I bought a Mac Keyboard with Numpad for my Desktop (because customizing a MacBook keyboard to function like Windows is more difficult/impossible, luckily the other way around is not too difficult). I then needed to modify the default behaviors slightly to better simulate the Mac keyboard experience on Windows. The main differences are with the cmd+`key` functions vs ctrl+`key` and the location of the numpad operators. I used autohotkey to customize the default behavior and it works pretty well. Instructions on how to do this are below.

Setup Steps:


You'll need to install autohotkey on Windows: http://www.autohotkey.com/

Then copy this script to your local machine somewhere: (feel free to modify to your heart's content by the way)
https://github.com/aaronhoffman/utils/blob/master/AutoHotKey/MacKeyboardOnWindows.ahk

You'll then most likely want the script to start on startup. You'll need to create a shortcut to the script above here (might need to run as admin for some functions):

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\

(if the above path does not work, play around with adding a "\Roaming\" right after %appdata%)



Notes:

Unfortunately the experience isn't perfect. The most jarring difference is the Win+Tab key (or cmd+Tab key combo) can not be overridden on Windows to simulate the Alt+Tab functionality. This appears to be a security restriction. I did find a couple sites that said you can get it to work, but you have to compile the AHK script and sign it and elevate it to have special privileges on the machine... and I just wasn't going to do all that. Hopefully this will be better in Windows 10.

Special thanks to: https://github.com/stroebjo/autohotkey-windows-mac-keyboard this was the script I started with and modified.


Hope this helps,
Aaron




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