MacOS – anker keyboard escape key

I severely doubt that you will need any drivers to make it work out of the box, as nearly all keyboards are just plug-and-play with the Mac, although it seems with this one you only need install drivers if you want to activate volume control and eject functionality. (if it's any help, the driver is located here). This driver appears to be rubbish, not very friendly and unreliable, so if volume control and eject keys are important to you, and you really want to avoid installing drivers, then you had better avoid this keyboard, in my opinion.

Replacements wise, Apple do great keyboards themselves, particularly the newer slimline style keyboards. These go for about £30-£45 on eBay. They do not, however, come in a wireless form with the numerical keypad, which I know will be a problem for some people. Apple keyboards come in laptop MacBook layout (wireless), MacBook layout (wired with extra USB port), and MacBook layout with numerical keypad (wired with extra USB port) variations. These all work right out of the box.

If you really want an Apple wireless keyboard with the numerical keypad, you can get help with that here.

In terms of others besides Apple's, I know logitech do some nice ones that work very well, but thats about all I can tell you I'm afraid.

Hope this helps.

I've developed a terminal for iOS (it is not released, is intended as a base for other projects) and I have tried for hours to see any kind of event or modifier when meta keys are used on an external keyboard. The only way to get these events is to use private APIs and if you do that you can't get your app on the store. I have filed an issue (Apple rdar 10283552) and hopefully this will change in a future release.

So the problem is not your keyboard, it is iOS. I think you have found the best solution with key chords, unless you want to use one of the better apps like Prompt, which gives you "soft" meta keys on the screen - but the whole point is to keep your hands on the external keyboard, I know.

I don't know for sure if Prompt keeps those meta keys visible when a BT keyboard is connected - it can be done in code - if it did maybe soft metas would be better than nothing.