I wish some option could allow me to swap the left and right alt/option keys of the Mac keyboard in a Windows (XP especially) guest. Today, Parallels desktop conveniently map the left alt/option key to Windows alt key and the right alt/option key to the Windows Alt-Gr key, which is of huge importance to non-USA keyboard users to compose special characters. Yet... I think it would be even more useful to actually have the Mac left alt/option key map to Windows Alt-Gr and the Mac right alt/option key map to Windows Alt. Why? When people do build alternative Windows keyboard maps in an attempt to type inside their Windows virtual machines using the same keys as when typing inside their Mac OS X applications, you invariably hit the Windows Alt key limitation. The Alt key is a very special key in Windows. It triggers window messages all by itself and is much more than a simple modifier key which you can use at will in keyboard maps. Let's take an example. On a Mac french or belgian keyboard, using Mac OS X, you will press shift-alt-/ to get a backslash ( \ ). When building a Windows keyboard map to be used in Windows XP inside a Parallels desktop VM it would be more than pleasant to map shift-alt-/ to emit a backslash: but you can't. Because Windows treats the alt key special, it won't let you combine it in such a way. Though you can do so with the alt-gr key: you can define shift-altgr-/ to emit your backslash. So the trick is to use the right side Mac alt, yeah. Unfortunately for a right-handed person this is often unusual: most I have observed, including me, will naturally tend to compose shift-alt on the left hand and type the character / on the right hand. Well, time to make it shorter: please in the very next update you might release, do offer a way to swap the left and right alt/option keys. I understand that MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards (as well as the new smaller wireless keyboard I think) do not have a righ side alt key. There is already an option to remap the secondary enter key to alt-gr. Fine. When the left/right swap would be activated, the secondary enter key would simply have tp remap to alt so that people always have both alt and alt-gr at their fingertips: one on the left and the other on the right, or the reverse to their liking. Sorry for this too long post, I wanted to try to get the motivations for the swap clear.
