The contest for shortest and most obscure Pointers tutorial topic continues – and may be over. No more calls, we have a winner: this one is about changing your keyboard language. It's so obscure that you may not even understand what that means: if you're in America, for instance, you can tell your Mac that you prefer a British keyboard. Amongst other things, it saves you having to contort your fingers to press the right combination of shift and Command keys to get your local currency symbol.
Only, it goes wrong. We don't know why but it goes wrong and actually that's the real reason for this Pointers. Macs come pre-set for the country you bought them in so most people don't know or care that this feature exists. There is a small subset of people who move countries or are ex-pats with stubborn muscle memory, that quite reasonably wants keys to be where they were. Which means there is an even smaller subset of people for whom this goes wrong.
That's who this is for. The people who –– as we did this week –– found that our iMac keyboard has gone hinky. Based in the UK, we abruptly found that pressing the correct key for £ got us a hash symbol instead. Now, some people call that the pound symbol but that's a mix of craziness and fascinating typographical history, it's not something you're anxious to get into when you're delivering an invoice.
So this is for you when this happens and you're Googling words like "Apple keyboard layout changes" or "why isn't my dollar key where I left it."
This was tested on the late 2012 27-inch iMac running OS X El Capitan which gave us the problem this week, but all of the following applies to certainly every OS X Mac ever. There was a very similar, possibly identical, system spanning back to System 5, at least.
Where to go
Open System Preferences and choose Keyboard. From the four lozenge-like buttons at the top, click the last one: Input Sources. You should get something that looks close to this:
Look at the left hand column with flags and country names. If your keyboard has gone mad, that will be wrong. In our case we are in Britain but the only entry in here said USA and had the American flag. Again, we didn't choose anything that could've switched this on: it happened by itself. We suspect some software application changed it but we can't prove that or even narrow down the suspects.
To fix it, we clicked the + sign at the bottom and picked our favorite keyboard –– sorry, our "favourite" keyboard –– and that was that. Adding a new keyboard also makes that the default. That's a typically nice Apple touch: they thought about it and realised that you are unlikely to be adding a keyboard for the hell of it, you're adding it to use so that's what they do right away.
Only, they don't delete the old keyboard. Nor should they: you could and people do keep multiple keyboards. We'd probably leave the old one there too except for what happens the moment you have two keyboards. Again, Apple twigs that you are doing this because you're going to use both so they make it very easy for you to switch. Rather than expect you to keep going back to System Preferences, choosing Keyboard, clicking the correct lozenge and then choosing from a list, Apple pops a list in your menubar.
Whenever you have two or more keyboards, Apple puts a flag icon in your menu bar. It's the flag of the currently selected keyboard and when you click on it you get a drop down listing any others you've added. As we never intentionally change keyboards, we don't like this. It's not that we're anti-patriotic, but we don't need a flag icon to tell us where we are and we do need every pixel of space on our menubar for the sixteen billion other icons we've got there.
There's no way within that drop down menu to switch off the flag but you also don't have to schlep all the way through System Preferences, Keyboard and Input Sources. Just some of the way. Click on the menubar icon and choose Open Keyboard Preferences then Input Sources. Click on a keyboard you're not using and press the minus sign. Do that until you're left with just the keyboard you want and as it is now the sole keyboard selected, there's nothing to switch to and Apple removes the switching flag icon.
We suddenly wonder what would happen if we deleted that last keyboard and had nothing left. However, on the one hand we have had this rogue problem a couple of times over the years and it's been a pain trying to figure out how to fix it. Plus we're cowards.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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