Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

keyd VS Ukelele

Compare keyd VS Ukelele and see what are their differences

keyd logo keyd

Linux lacks a good key remapping solution. In order to achieve satisfactory results a medley of tools need to be employed (e.g xcape, xmodmap) with the end result often being tethered to a specified environment (X11).

Ukelele logo Ukelele

Ukelele is a Unicode Keyboard Layout Editor for Mac OS X.
Not present
  • Ukelele Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-28

keyd features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Ukelele features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Ukelele offers a graphical interface that makes it easy for users to create and modify keyboard layouts without extensive technical knowledge.
  • Customizable Keyboard Layouts
    Users can fully customize Mac OS X keyboard layouts, allowing them to assign new characters or functions to different keys according to their needs.
  • Unicode Support
    Ukelele supports Unicode, which means users can create layouts for a wide range of languages and special characters.
  • Free Software
    Ukelele is available for free, making it accessible to anyone who needs to modify keyboard layouts without additional financial burden.

Possible disadvantages of Ukelele

  • MacOS Exclusive
    Ukelele is only available for MacOS, limiting its utility to Mac users and excluding those on other operating systems like Windows or Linux.
  • Limited Support
    As a free tool, Ukelele may not offer extensive customer support or documentation compared to paid software solutions.
  • Learning Curve
    While more user-friendly than coding layouts manually, creating customized layouts may still require some learning and experimentation for optimal use.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to keyd and Ukelele)
Windows Tools
42 42%
58% 58
Automation
40 40%
60% 60
Note Taking
45 45%
55% 55
Scripts
48 48%
52% 52

User comments

Share your experience with using keyd and Ukelele. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ukelele should be more popular than keyd. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

keyd mentions (1)

  • Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander
    You can get pretty far with software-only tweaks to your existing keyboard instead. I've settled on keyd[1], after using XKB and interception-tools for a while. [1]: https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd. - Source: Hacker News / 7 days ago

Ukelele mentions (9)

  • How to Use Em Dashes (โ€“), En Dashes (โ€“), and Hyphens (-)
    It's very easyยน on MacOS to make yourself a custom layout with the characters you commonly use. Personally, I put arrows on โŒฅโ‡งHJKL, vi-style.ยฒ ยน https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ ยฒ https://codeberg.org/datatravelandexperiments/kps-keyboard-layouts. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Kanata: Cross-platform multi-layer keyboard remapper with advanced customization
    For MacOS there's https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ For Linux, unfortunately xkb is overcomplicated and undercapable, and it's like pulling teeth to get a layout recognized as a first-class citizen by a Linux โ€˜desktopโ€™. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Emacs Speaks Statistics
    There are conflicting systems in macOS at play here as a result of choosing the "Option" key as your "Meta" key. The basics of the Cocoa Emacs Keybindings (DefaultKeyBinding.dict) do allow for M-f/M-b/M-d to work as us Emacs users expect, however there is a conflict with the default US Keyboard Layout, which hijack these useful Option key sequences to allow for the easy input of letters with various diacritic... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Alt+number Sequences
    On the Mac, it's quite easy to have customized keyboard layouts to make it easy to type characters you use frequently. If you want to have Option-f and Option-p to give you ๐†‘ and ๐†, you can. https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ is a nice GUI that lets you start from your current preferred layout and make changes. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)
    Seeing as it wasn't mentioned, there's a Ukelele[0] app for making keyboard layouts for macOS. After installing, switching layouts is as easy as tapping 'fn' by itself or using the keyboard menu icon. [0] https://software.sil.org/ukelele/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing keyd and Ukelele, you can also consider the following products

SuperOps - Modern PSA and RMM Software for MSP's and IT Teams

Microsoft keyboard layout creator - Edit the windows keyboard layout.

SharpKeys - SharpKeys is a utility that manages a Registry key that allows Windows to remap one key to any...

xremap - xremap is a key remapper for Linux. Unlike xmodmap, it supports app-specific remapping and Wayland.

Karabiner - Karabiner, previously called KeyRemap4MacBook, is a very powerful keyboard remapper for Mac OS X.

Stick Shift - Stick Shift saves you time by removing repetitive changes to hand position when programming.