Change symbols with alt modifer

Question

so this has probably been asked, but I have not exactly been able to figure it out. I was just wondering if it is possible to change what the alternate characters are on my keyboard. I have osx 10.9 and use the keyboard on a 15" macbook retina.

For example I never use the ¢ or £ symbols, but frequently use greek letters like η, or λ. It would be nice if I could have all of my frequently used symbols to be mapped to what I want.

I have googled this and not really found out anything useful.

Answer 1

Not exactly what you're asking for, but I use

System Preferences - Keyboard - Input Sources

to add Greek & other layouts, and tick the 'Show Input menu in menu bar' option. This results in a pretty menu with keyboard layouts marked by national flag. And, a ctrl-cmd-space shortcut to cycle between them.

Also:

System Preferences - Keyboards - Show Keyboard and Character Viewers in menu bar

for all other typographical symbols

Answer 2

A tool for making a custom keyboard layout is Ukelele:

http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele

Answer 3

there is alternative way to reassign the alt keys

You will have to find the one you want to replace and replace its alt+?+? to what you used for it.

In this example it is the alt+shift+2 creates the €

that can be changed to λ by doig following:

Create ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict and enter

{ "$~2" = (insertText:, "λ"); }

This rebinds ⇧⌥2 to insert λ

$ = ⇧, ~ = ⌥

Quit and reopen applications for the change to take effect

*Credit to @grgarside