

Go ahead and download the program from that link and install it on your machine. Let's fix that!įor this next step we'll need another free program, AutoHotKey. If you're like me and use Alt+Tab to switch between windows a lot, that's where you'll notice this problem the most. Because all we did was map the keys differently, keyboard shortcuts that made use of Alt now expect to use Ctrl. You can now try it out and see that your Alt and Ctrl keys have been switched! Instead of using Ctrl+C for copying, you'll now be using Alt+C. If everything looks right, click the Write to Registry button towards the lower right to save your changes. After you do that, your program's main screen should look like this: You're looking to map both the Left Ctrl key to Left Alt, and the Left Alt key to Left Ctrl. Once you have it installed, open it up and click the Add button toward the lower right. The app is entirely open source, and you'll need to visit the releases GitHub page downloading the latest. For this, you'll need to download and install a program called SharpKeys. The first part of this will be dedicated to swapping out our Ctrl key for the Alt key, which mimics the Apple keyboard Cmd key placement. There's a few different methods out there, but I found a combination of two things that were easy to set up using free software, and have performed consistently well since I added them a few weeks ago. I figured there had to be others like me out there who have solved this, so I went searching for a solution. The downside though is that my day-to-day work is on a MacBook, and (although I feel alone in this) I absolutely love using Alt instead of Ctrl for things like copying and pasting.

The timing couldn't be perfect either, as Windows released WSL 2 recently and its performance with Docker Desktop has been incredible. Although of course I started tinkering here and there with programming on it, and eventually decided to go full in on making it a web dev machine. Want a more detailed walk-through? Keep reading!Ī few months ago I put together a pretty decent Windows PC, mostly for gaming.

Save this script somewhere on your machine.Map Left Ctrl to Left Alt (and vice versa) in SharpKeys.
