I use ultravnc under Wine to provide remote help desk support to clients. (None of the Mac VNC clients I know of support proxy/repeater environments.)

Well the other day I went to support a user and all I got was gibberish from my keystrokes, after a bit of embarrassing “can you type XXXX and hit enter” type stuff, I disconnected and started trying to figure out if it was me or the end user. After a couple short tests on other remote computers, it became obvious there was something seriously wrong with my keymap. Just the XWindows one too, my keyboard worked fine outside of XWindows.

A couple google queries later and I had the answer.

Short Version

  1. Close XWindows
  2. Delete the directory at /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb

Done and done.

2 comments to “Mac XWindows Keymap messed up”

  1. Fabrizio says:

    Thank you very much! I had the same problem for no apparent reason!

  2. ksanders says:

    You’re welcome, glad it was helpful. I have no idea what triggered it, as I attempt to make as few changes as possible to my laptop as I use it nonstop as a consultant and need it to be extremely stable.

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