The same happens with a Finnish key layout both on the MBP's own keyboard and with external keyboards. The key left from Z (<>) and left from 1 (¶°) are swapped when Karabiner Elements is running. The OSX version is 10.12.6 and I'm running 11.1.0. This has happened for a longer time spanning many previous Karabiner Element versions.

Hi,
seems i got the same thing in french, >< remapped to @# (bellow the esc key)

did you guys found a work arround ?

I made this adjustment and everything is as expected now:
Preferences > Virtual Keyboard > Keyboard Type : Set to ISO

German layout Cherry PC-keyboard and configured as such in OS. It seems that by default Karabiner makes all keyboards ANSI.

💥 perfect @bytesplit ... forks for me! many thanks

eratum: it work but only for one of my keyboard, it's either the internal either the external.... not both

I actually deactivated Karabiner in Devices for the internal keyboard. I don't use it when I have the external connected (think docked) and it would indeed reverse-swap the keys. Seems like Apple thinks ANSI for it's own international keyboards.

So test with all attached keyboards!

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Those keys are swapped here in FR ISO Macbook Keyboard here. Same keys, different labels due to FR layout : @# and <> are swapped.

For my Finnish MBP keyboard, ANSI is the correct setting, and it is ISO that gives swapped characters. for example the mentioned <> vs. §°

All seems fine with ANSI setting selected, except the mapping is different from the picture next to the radio-button.

Hello everyone. The solution @bytesplit mentioned used to work (Preferences > Virtual Keyboard > Keyboard Type : Set to ISO), but recent versions of Karabiner-Elements don't have any ANSI/ISO option anymore so the swapped keys problem still remains.

Now in the "Virtual Keyboard" tab you can just specify a numeric "Country Code", and I don't know what number I should specify. How do I find what's the proper number for the Spanish keyboard layout?

@ohcibi : What "patch note" are you referring to? I've already done the "Change keyboard type" several times, but I still get the swapped keys when Karabiner is running.

What "wrong" keyboard are you selecting so it works correctly when Karabiner is running?

This unfortunately doesn't work for me.

If I try to detect the keyboard while Karabiner-Elements is running, when I press "><" I get the message "The keyboard can't be identified".

If I try to detect the keyboard with Karabiner-Elements closed, then it works, but even if I select ANSI instead of ISO, the "><" and "ªº" keys are swapped no matter if I run Karabiner-Elements or not (for some reason Karabiner doesn't spontaneously swap the keys in ANSI mode, only in ISO mode).

To sum up:

• In ISO mode, "><" and "ªº" keys are swapped only when Karabiner-Elements is running.
• In ANSI mode, "><" and "ªº" keys are swapped no matter if Karabiner-Elements is running or not.

So I don't have the proper keys unless in ISO mode and with Karabiner-Elements closed.

Also, for some stupid reason only Apple knows, after using it a few times, the "Change Keyboard Type..." button has completely DISAPPEARED from the Keyboard settings window! Now I can't use that button because it doesn't exist. WTF?!

Any suggestions?

I add exactly this trouble but with a french keyboard. You need to reset your keyboard type. Have a look at #1365 (comment).

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

This problem is still happening with the latest 12.1.5 version of Karabiner-Elements. The <> and ºª keys are still swapped in the Spanish keyboard. Please, fix it!!!

This issue is happening at 12.2.2, with a Swedish MacBook Pro keyboard layout

§° and <> are swapped respectively.

@ohcibi What better tool are you talking about?

I see. You could have typed "BetterTouchTool", which is the actual name of the app, rather than "better touch tool" all lowercase and with spaces between the words, which didn't look like an app name at all but just a passing comment about some "better touch tool". I ignored the "touch" part in my comment because that didn't make sense to me when we're talking about keyboards.

For people reading this, here's the link of the app's website: https://folivora.ai/

The pricing is not bad at all. $6.50 for 2 years of updates (and you can keep using the app after that period even if you don't get any more updates), or $20 for a lifetime license which also gives you access to other apps as well included in the price.

Sorry for the somewhat off-topic post, but this is relevant when the developer of Karabiner-Elements won't listen to our bug report at all!

Did you really get offended by my comment? I just suggested you could have called it like it's actually called by its author, BetterTouchTool. I didn't mean to tick you off ;).
BTW, thanks for suggesting this app.

Well, I have tried it, but I can't seem to get it to do what I need: Globally swapping the Ctrl key and the Cmd key. The keyboard part in this app seems to be focused in shortcuts rather than single keys. Do you know how to configure this to swap these modifier keys?

@ohcibi And now you delete all of your posts here? Just because of a single innocent suggestion on the spelling of the app you mentioned? So you're removing useful information for everyone just because you somehow got offended by a light unimportant comment I made. Some people get so easily offended...

At least people can still read my message about the name of the app and link to their website.

Well, bad news for me and anyone who wants to remap keys: One of the admins at the BetterTouchTool website told me that "BetterTouchTool is not a good tool for key remappings. You should consider using Karabiner Elements app for that"

Heh, yeah, so we're back to square zero :(

This issue has been plaguing a lot of users since at least 2 years ago. I hope the Karabiner-Elements developer can notice us and take a look at this issue.

A couple of months and several updates later the problem still remains.

Why is this issue closed? This issue has NOT been resolved at all!!! :(

I solved it (Germany, ^ swapped with </>): I just randomly entered a 7 as the keyboard country code. The Mac then says my keyboard is not identified, so I click on identify; asks me to press the key next to Shift; asks me to select between ANSI, ISO or JIS, I select ISO and tadaaaa everything fine again! Hope this helps someone else as well!

Hi, you have a list of country codes to use here.
For spanish is 25. The only problem is that it may mess with your macbook keyboard, so when you want to use it you may have to change the code back to 0.

I still have this same issue.
I can fix this by forcing a keyboard type change and pressing the corresponding key in either the external keyboard or the MBP's internal, but I can't make both work at the same type.

Both keyboards are the same Spanish ISO layout, and I have it configured as such.

Also, for what it's worth, I ran this

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist AppleEnabledInputSources

And the output is:

(
        {
        InputSourceKind = "Keyboard Layout";
        "KeyboardLayout ID" = 87;
        "KeyboardLayout Name" = "Spanish - ISO";
    }
)

Since this problem with the Spanish (an other languages) keyboard was never fixed, my solution to the issue was adding a key mapping so "grave_accent_and_tilde (`)" gets swapped with "non_us_backslash" and viceversa (2 rules). By doing that, the keyboard is back to normal.

Yes, I ended up finding that solution as well, and it solved it for me for the time being.

I need multiple profiles because for Macbook integrated keyboard, virtual keyboard country code 0 is needed, and for my external ISO keyboard, it's country code 2. So every time I switch keyboards, I have to change the karabiner profile manually between those two.

Is there a way to avoid having to manually switch the profile? It is quite a nuisance. I was thinking maybe some kind of tool could change the profile based on last used input device.

@raine Have you tried selecting the external keyboard under simple modifications and creating a mapping from grave_accent_and_tilde (`) to non_us_backslash and vice versa? This should apply the change only to the external keyboard.

@raine Have you tried selecting the external keyboard under simple modifications and creating a mapping from grave_accent_and_tilde (`) to non_us_backslash and vice versa? This should apply the change only to the external keyboard.

This approach seems to have worked. Thanks!

Thanks a lot @joppuyo, it works well for French keyboard between #/@ and </> too.
Cheers.

Thanks @joppuyo , I have been looking for a solution to this problem for several days since I changed keyboard.

@raine Have you tried selecting the external keyboard under simple modifications and creating a mapping from grave_accent_and_tilde (`) to non_us_backslash and vice versa? This should apply the change only to the external keyboard.

Life saver!

Also bitten by this (spanish keyboard exchanging < and º keys). It's a pity this has been open and unresolved for so long.

Also bitten by this (spanish keyboard exchanging < and º keys). It's a pity this has been open and unresolved for so long.

I'm actually not sure if this is a problem with Mac OS, keyboard vendors, or Karabiner Elements.

My issue was specifically that an external keyboard had these two keys swapped and I used Karabiner Elements to fix this issue as I wrote in my blog. I think in this case the keyboard vendor was using some kind of spoofed Apple profile for the keyboard and this caused issues with the operating system.

But it could be that there's an actual bug in Karabiner related to these two keys changing when it's actually not intended.

@joppuyo Yes, you may be right and this can be not Karabiner's fault but rather the device's.
It also happened to me with an external mechanical keyboard (a Newskill Pyros Ivory), and after posting the above, I did a lot more tries, and somehow I ended up in a stable situation where I have country code set to zero, with ISO Spanish Layout, and I don't need to exchange the keys anymore. But that was exactly my initial situation when I reported the mentioned malfunction. So I don't really know what happened. Maybe it was due to the device, maybe some Karabiner state, maybe some strange interaction between the two things.

Thanks for pointing that out, and I just leave here my correction to my previous comment for the record.

For those who have this issue:

In Karabiner Elements:

• Create a Simple Modification
  • grave_accent_and_tilde -> non_us_backslash
  • non_us_backslash -> grave_accent_and_tilde

Worked for me for fixing the <> vs ºª issue.