keyboard hell running SE on Linux running under VMware on a Mac.

[billtouch]

My environment is usually Linus running native on a pc. On this particular contract, I am running SE under Linux but Linux is running under VMware running on a mac. SE makes wonderful use of the pc keyboard. I use brief emulation and many of the useful actions are single keystroke making use of the numeric keypad as well.
Does anyone else use SE with the miniature mac keyboard? What emulation do you find best and do you remap any keys? Would getting a pc keyboard (usb) help me or would the mac regurgitate on me?
Any help at all would be helpful.

[Matthew]

Personally I can't stand those tiny Mac keyboards. I do like Apple's full-size USB keyboard with the number pad. Since I spend most of my time on the Mac, I use Mac OS X emulation most often, and even use that with my Linux VMs. Most, but not all, of the Mac emulation keybindings that use Cmd+key also have a Ctrl+key binding, so there's not much brain-shifting needed.
The Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 has been a favorite with several others here. It's cheap, light, and the key travel is firm but not noisy. Works just fine with the Mac. We bought a whole stack of 'em a couple years ago. Looks like the Curve 3000 is the most recent version, but I haven't used that one.

[vse_decline]

I spent some time using VSE in Windows in a VM on Mac since there was no native version. I could never stand any of the keyboards shipped with or mac. I've always used a Model M with USB adapter and it works fine. Mac doesn't care at all if it's a PC keyboard, it really can't tell the difference. If you use a 104-key keyboard, the windows keys will work as the command/apple/propeller key. If you like to live retro like me and use a 101-key keyboard, they you can redefine the modifier keys in the system settings (before they added that, I used to use a hexeditor to alter the array of scancodes in the keyboard driver). The most comfortable configuration is to leave Alt as Option, change Ctrl to be Cmd (which makes it easy going between windows Ctrl-s and mac Cmd-s, same physical key location), change Caps Lock to be Ctrl (since you don't really need caps lock unless you write COBOL, also Ctrl is then where it 'should be' if you are a Sun freak). The only oddity about using a PC keyboard on mac is that num lock and scroll lock lights don't work since the mac has no concept of them, and it can get a little weird since the mac always uses the numpad in numlocked mode but most OSes you'd run in a VM care about the numlock state and thus maintain an internal notion of it but can't convey their view of the state to you. Same for scroll lock except the list of OSes that use that key is much smaller (mainly affects us BSD users).

The one other detail I'll inform you about is not all PS/2->USB adapters are the same. No issue if you use a modern USB keyboard, but if you have a favorite old PS/2 keyboard it can matter. I can only find one brand/model of adapter that actually gives the keyboard the full current expected of a PS/2 port, which is essential for a Model M (perhaps known by some, but it caught me by surprise as using a Mac was the first and only time I had to use a USB adapter so I went through several before finding one that works).