One of the things people love about Mac OS is that it allows you
to customize nearly every aspect of it. And by that, turning it
into a true personal system. 

That includes keyboard layouts too. For example: I wasn't happy
with where the @ sign would be on my keyboard layout. Why should
I settle with something I don't like? After all, this is not some
new-fangled Apple or Microsoft stuff, isn't it? 

All you need is ResEdit, the popular resource file editor. If you
don't have it yet, we've got a copy in our Applications section.


So how do I change the key mapping for my keyboard layout?
Here's how: 

1.
Go to your System Folder. Inside you'll find a suitcase called
"System". If you open it, you should see all the keyboard layouts
of your system. And possibly additional sound files. Make a
backup of the keyboard layout you'd like to make changes to.
(you'll have to close all running applications first) 


2.
Rename the keyboard layout file, e.g. from English to
EnglishImproved or something else. 

Now open your copy with ResEdit. You'll see it contains 4
resources. In order to avoid conflict with existing layouts, we
have to rename those copied files to something else. 

Double click on a resource, highlight the content in the new
dialog and Get Resource Info on it. Put in a new, unique name and
new unique ID not used by other keyboard layouts on your
Macintosh, as seen in this screenshot. Repeat the same with the
three remaining resources. If you're unsure about what ID/name is
taken, check out the other keyboard layouts in your System folder
for their IDs or simply go with something ridiculously high (e.g.
255). 


3.
Now we got our unique keyboard layout not conflicting with other
existing ones anymore. Open the KCHR resource and you'll see your
keyboard and the characters mapped to it. 

You can now simply drag & drop the characters in place as you
please. By pressing the option, shift, command & other keys you
can jump to the different tables used for key combinations, so
you can change all those special characters too. 

After you are done, don't forget to save your changes. You'll
have to place your edited keyboard file back in the "System"
folder next to the other layouts and reboot. Upon your next
bootup, you'll be able to pick it from the list in Control Panels
-> Keyboard. 

4.
Voila! You just created your own keyboard layout. If you feel
creative, you could now even create an individual icon for it, to
make it stand out from the standard Apple icons. Go back to
ResEdit and pick Create New Resource via the menubar. Choose ics#
as the type and you can pixel your own little icon. 

.