Mac OS external keyboard Alt key not recognized

[Amonosolete]

I play CoH on my MacBook and have an external keyboard with normal windows keys that I play on. My Alt key is not recognized by the game at all, when I press it nothing happens. Instead all my Alt+# power tray is activated by the windows keys. Essentially the game thinks my windows key is Alt, and when I try to rebind the second power tray to Alt+#, the key mapping tool doesn’t recognize Alt being pushed at all. Any help?

[macskull]

Does the Alt key function normally in MacOS?

[Amonosolete]

3 hours ago, macskull said:

Does the Alt key function normally in MacOS?

Yes it does

[macskull]

21 hours ago, Amonosolete said:

Yes it does

If I remember right, the Alt key on a Windows keyboard will function as the Option key in MacOS, since Mac keyboards do not have an Alt key - and this is where your problem starts. Wine handles some modifier keys differently than you'd expect, so the Option key literally does nothing because Wine doesn't use it. As another example, if you wanted to copy/paste an item from outside the game into the game you'd have to use Cmd-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste. This is an unfortunate reality of how Wine handles certain modifier keys, and most of the guides or tips/tricks for changing it are either a decade old and may be horribly outdated, or are pretty complex and require manually editing files.

 

TL;DR: The simplest solution is just to keep doing things the way you're doing them and get used to the annoyance.

Edited Friday at 02:13 AM by macskull

[Zhym]

As @macskull explains, Wine doesn't use the Option key at all.  It maps the Command key to Alt.  So under the default mapping, CMD-<#> activates powers in the second tray.  If you look at the Keymapping tab in your options window, you'll see these listed as Alt+<#>, because CoH sees anything with Command as Alt.  CTRL-<#> activates powers in the third tray.