Your left Command key will function as a second Control key, which means many Mac Command key shortcuts will just work like you’d expect them to. Press the Control key.Ĭlick OK and click “Write to Registry.” Log out and log in or reboot to activate your changes. Next, click the “Type Key” button under the “To key” column on the right. Click the Add button and click “Type Key” under the “From key” column on the left.
To do this, install SharpKeys and launch it. Pressing Command+L will focus the location bar in your web browser on Windows just as it does on OS X - without the remapping, that Command+L shortcut equals Windows Key+L, which will lock your Windows system. You’ll then be able to use Mac keyboard shortcuts like Command+C, X, or V for Copy, Cut, and Paste in Windows. If you’re used to Mac keyboard shortcuts, you may want to make the Command key function as the Control key.
RELATED: A Windows User's Guide to Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts Solution 1: If You’re Used to Mac Shortcuts This utility works on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and even older versions of Windows. You could actually do this all in the registry editor if you like - it just takes more work. SharpKeys is an easy-to-use, open-source graphical program that creates the appropriate Windows registry entries to remap keys. We’ll be using SharpKeys to remap these keys in Windows. There has to be a way to fix this - and there is. Worse yet, Mac users will have to use the Control key for various keyboard shortcuts that require the Command key on Mac OS X. In other words, the Alt and Windows key are swapped from where you’d expect them to be. In Boot Camp, these keys function as Control, Alt, Windows. On a Mac keyboard, you’ll see the following layout: Control, Option, Command.
On a typical PC keyboard, the bottom-left corner of the keyboard contains keys in this order: Ctrl, Windows, Alt. Mac keyboard layouts are subtly different from PC keyboard layouts.
The Option key functions as Alt and the Command key functions as the Windows key.RELATED: How to Install Windows on a Mac With Boot Camp
When running Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp, the keyboard mappings are changed so they make more sense in Windows. RELATED: Map Any Key to Any Key on Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, or Vista You can also set the Caps Lock key to “No Action” here, effectively disabling the Caps Lock key on your Mac. If you’d like to change which key does what, you can customize this by clicking the Apple menu, opening System Preferences, selecting the Keyboard icon, and clicking Modifier Keys. Aside from ⌘ representing Command and ⌥ representing Option, ^ represents Control while ⇧ represents the Shift key. To perform the keyboard shortcuts shown throughout Mac OS X, you’ll need to know the symbols. RELATED: How to Disable Caps Lock in macOS if you’re not used to a Mac’s keyboard, these symbols may look like hieroglyphics - but they’re really saying you should press Option+Command+Escape to open the dialog where you can force-quit applications. Unlike for the Command key, we don’t have any history that indicates why this symbol was chosen.įor example, when you click the Apple menu you’ll see the keyboard shortcut assigned to Force Quit. This symbol is used throughout the Mac’s menus to indicate when you can press the Option key, the same way the Command key’s symbol is. Like other modifier keys, it’s also used as part of some keyboard shortcuts. For example, pressing Option+4 with the US keyboard layout will produce ¢, the cent sign which normally doesn’t appear on your keyboard. Holding it and pressing another key allows you to type a special character that doesn’t normally appear on the keyboard. The Option key functions similarly to the AltGr key on many PC keyboards, which explains why it also has “Alt” printed on it. The Control (Ctrl) key is also present, but it isn’t used for as many things. In summary, on a Mac, you’ll probably be pressing the Command key to issue keyboard shortcuts. It’s an old symbol used in Nordic countries to indicate places of interest - in Sweden, it’s the official sign for a tourist attraction. A designer chose the ⌘ symbol to replace it. The Command key originally had an Apple logo on it, but Steve Jobs thought displaying the Apple logo throughout the original Macintosh’s menu would be overusing the logo. This symbol appears throughout the Mac’s menus to indicate when you can press the Command key along with another key to issue a keyboard shortcut.
For example, while you press Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+V to copy, cut, and paste on Windows, you press Command+C, Command+X, and Command+V to do the same on a Mac. It’s a modifier key you can press to issue keyboard shortcuts to applications. The Command key doesn’t do anything on its own.