
Now, Mouse Keys will only be enabled if you press the ‘Option’ key five times in quick succession, which isn’t something you’re likely to do by accident!Īnd, if your keyboard is only producing numbers, then you’ve probably activated Num Lock by mistake – pressing the ‘fn’ and ‘F6’ keys should fix this problem. Select the ‘Press the Option key five times to toggle Mouse Keys’ checkbox.If you did accidentally enable Mouse Keys, then you may want to make it more difficult to trigger this feature in the future: If the ‘Enable Mouse Keys’ checkbox is selected, then deselect it – this should restore normal keyboard functionality.


If what you’re seeing onscreen doesn’t match your physical keyboard, then you’ll need to select a different layout: If you’re unsure whether this is the right layout for you, then select it and compare the diagram that appears onscreen, to the layout of your physical keyboard. In the left-hand menu you’ll see your currently-selected layout. Navigate to ‘System Preferences… > Keyboard.’.MacOS can map your keyboard to a range of different layouts that are optimised for different languages and regions, so if hitting a key that’s marked is giving you an “, then you should check whether your keyboard is mapped to the “wrong” layout:

Are your keys typing the wrong characters? In this section I’m going to explore all the issues that can be caused by incorrect keyboard settings, and show you how to fix them.

If anyone else has access to your Mac, then it’s also possible that they may have gone poking around in your System Preferences and changed your settings, either by accident or as a joke. There’s a wide range of keyboard problems you can encounter that are actually caused by your Mac’s settings.Įven if you haven’t manually adjusted your keyboard settings, it’s possible that you may have accidentally triggered a shortcut that has made some changes, or perhaps a third party app or software update has modified your settings without your knowledge.
