Making Colemak the default layout at the OS X login promptEdit

Created , updated

Via Ask Different:

$ cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist /tmp/
$ plutil -convert xml1 /tmp/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist
$ plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist
$ vim /tmp/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist
$ plutil -lint !$ # sanity check
$ sudo cp !$ /Library/Preferences/

After editing AppleCurrentKeyboardLayoutInputSourceID, KeyboardLayout ID and KeyboardLayout Name (which you can get from the ~/Library/Preferences/ file which we coverted above), the result looks something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>AppleCurrentKeyboardLayoutInputSourceID</key>
	<string>com.apple.keylayout.Colemak</string>
	<key>AppleDefaultAsciiInputSource</key>
	<dict>
		<key>InputSourceKind</key>
		<string>Keyboard Layout</string>
		<key>KeyboardLayout ID</key>
		<integer>12825</integer>
		<key>KeyboardLayout Name</key>
		<string>Colemak</string>
	</dict>
	<key>AppleEnabledInputSources</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>InputSourceKind</key>
			<string>Keyboard Layout</string>
			<key>KeyboardLayout ID</key>
			<integer>12825</integer>
			<key>KeyboardLayout Name</key>
			<string>Colemak</string>
		</dict>
		<dict>
			<key>InputSourceKind</key>
			<string>Keyboard Layout</string>
			<key>KeyboardLayout ID</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>KeyboardLayout Name</key>
			<string>U.S.</string>
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>