I’ve been through a fair number of keyboards over the years, some expensive and some not. One of my favorites is still the CODE Keyboard, which I wrote about before. I still love this keyboard but I was starting to have pain in my forearms after a long day of typing. I keep coming back to the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard to on macOS. Why? Because it’s a tradeoff between being ergonomic and being inexpensive. I’ve seen some other customizable keyboards in the range of $350 but I haven’t found the large price tag necessary.

One annoyance when using many keyboards is the fact that they are setup for Windows operation system and not macOS. This means the Command key is not to the left of the space bar as Mac people expect. The Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard has the Alt key in that location. It’s a simple fix.

Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys…

Notice the Option Key and Command Key defaults. The Mac is recognizing the Alt key as the Option key. We need to make a change.

The easy fix is to swap the two keys in the modifier. Option becomes Command and Command switches to Option. Click OK and everything should work as expected.

This saved the day with properly mapping the command key. If you need other keys mapped differently on this keyboard, there is another option. Karabiner is a powerful utility for the Mac that allows a wide variety of keyboard mapping. It was more than I needed.

I hope this helps.