MacOS – Some dvorak shortcuts aren’t working. 10.8.2

dvorakmacbook promacos

I just got a new Macbook Air, and was all excited to code: but then wham.

For example I cannot do command + / Which is pretty valuable when coding. It treats it as Command + {

I'm trying to use standard dvorak, not the Dvorak-Qwerty (not that I want to either) though it has the exact same issue.

It happens in both Netbeans and PHPStorm which leads to believe that this may be a mac issue and not an IDE issue. It's pretty frustrating trying to code when some keyboard shortcuts aren't working. While some like Command + C,V,Z work just fine.

How do I get these keyboard shortcuts to work as they do in any other operating system?

Best Answer

I'll repost here my answer from SO to the same problem:

It turns out this is a problem in Java that has existed for some years, and is still present in Java 9. See the bug report here: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8022079

JetBrains has been aware of the problem for some years, but is waiting for Oracle to fix it. See these JetBrains bug reports: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-6493 and https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-63779

In those reports you'll find a work-around using a free tool called Karabiner. I have just verified that it works for IntelliJ. It will probably also work for other Java-based tools.

The work-around is:

  • Download and install Karabiner from https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
  • In the OSX System Preferences, set your keyboard to the default "U.S. International" PC. If you don't often type diacritics and other international characters, it's easier to just set the keyboard to "U.S" instead.
  • In the Karabiner settings, type "dvorak" in the search box, then scroll down to the section For U.S. Input Source and check Ùse Dvorak Keyboard Layout (QWERTY to Dvorak)`
Related Question