Swap places between tilde (~) and section sign (§) key in your macbook keyboard – Paris Polyzos’ blog

In Greece we are using the US keyboard layout and that means that the tilde key (~) is placed next to number 1 at the top left corner of the key, like the following picture:

About a year ago we moved to Luxembourg and my old Macbook died, so I had to replace it with a new one that unfortunately has the German layout:

The problem is that even if you set the keyboard layout to US in MacOS when you hit the key next to 1, this symbol starts appearing §. I don’t have anything with the symbol but in my day to day it’s totally useless and I started missing my beloved symbol (~) which is so often used in coding.

Long story short, I had to find a way to swap places, through software, between the key, right next to left Shift key, and the one right next to 1. To do so, I experimented with different apps, scripts, etc. but what worked at the end is the following.

Swap tilde ~ key with §

Open your favourite terminal Terminal, iTerm, etc.. and run the following script:

hidutil property –set ‘{“UserKeyMapping”:[{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000035,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000064},{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000064,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000035}]}’

Now if you press the key next to 1 it will show up as ` and the key next to shift as §. This solution works until next restart.

If you want to make it permanent you need to run the following scripts:

Step 1. Store the following script in your home directory

cat << ‘EOF’ > ~/.tilde-switch && chmod +x ~/.tilde-switch hidutil property –set ‘{“UserKeyMapping”:[{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000035,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000064},{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000064,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000035}]}’ EOF

You can check your script at ~/.tilde-switch file your home directory.

Step 2. Create a task to run the file from step 1 on every startup

Run the following command, it will require admin privileges:

sudo /usr/bin/env bash -c “cat > /Library/LaunchAgents/org.custom.tilde-switch.plist” << EOF <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”> <plist version=”1.0″> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>org.custom.tilde-switch</string> <key>Program</key> <string>${HOME}/.tilde-switch</string> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> <key>KeepAlive</key> <false/> </dict> </plist> EOF

Step 3. Activate the task from step 2

Run the following command:

sudo launchctl load -w — /Library/LaunchAgents/org.custom.tilde-switch.plist

Undo the key swap

If you want to go back to the previous key setup, before the swap, you can do the following:

Undo the only switching script

hidutil property –set ‘{“UserKeyMapping”:[{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000035,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000035},{“HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”:0x700000064,”HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”:0x700000064}]}’

Undo all three steps

sudo launchctl unload -w — /Library/LaunchAgents/org.custom.tilde-switch.plist; sudo rm -f — /Library/LaunchAgents/org.custom.tilde-switch.plist ~/.tilde-switch