In a recent entry I speculated about what might have motivated Apple to add the ability to remap modifier keys. Was it because they wanted people to stop using third-party kernel hacks like uControl? One commenter thought it was because of the Mac Mini. Well, it looks like it was based on demand from the geek community. This is from comments in the AppleADBKeyboard.cpp source code:

// RY: To better support the BSD (hacker) community, the behavior

// of the caps lock key needs to be altered. On portables, the

// keyboard behaves a bit differently than external ADB keyboards.

// The keyboard still dispatches ADBK_CAPSLOCK in line with the

// behavior of a locking capslock, but we have also noticed

// that power keyup events are issued that correspond to the

// events not dispatched by the capslock key.

. . .

// FYI: The LED will still continue to be controlled by the PMU

// and change regardless of the state in SW. While this may not

// be desired, it has been the position of the BSD management and

// WWDR that the developement community is not concerned.

Very interesting. Apple generally doesn't seem to care about the geek market, but here it looks like they actually listened to them. Could it be that there's a geek or two working at Apple? Catering to the geeks is a good move, IMHO, since they're the ones writing the applications that play a huge role in making the Mac platform appealing in the first place.

I have to say, though, it's a shame about not fixing the LED—It's so un-Apple to do a half-assed job on the aesthetics. But hey, I'll take an officially supported ugly solution over a third-party ugly solution any day.

By the way, I guess I was a bit premature in declaring the case closed on mod key remapping. There's one last modifier key on the PowerBook keyboard that needs work. Actually, it's not a modifier key, but it should be. I'm talking, of course, about the hated “superfluous enter” key to the right of the right command key. Luckily, I'm not the only one who's not afraid to mess with keyboard driver .plist files. I haven't yet tried the hack he outlines there but I believe it should work just fine.