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Well it only took me an hour and a half to figure out how to enter a backslash on my Japanese MacBook Pro. Kotoeri->Preferences->”Enter a backslash instead of a yen mark”.

Japanese PC keyboards have both backslash and yen mark keys, with backslash located (suprisingly) next to slash. The shifted state of backslash on a PC keyboard is underscore. Now, the shifted state of the key next to slash on my MBP keyboard is also an underscore. Would anyone care to guess what the unshifted state is? That’s right, underscore! Apple has done the sensible thing and duplicated the underscore in both the shifted and unshifted states! Yay!

May I humbly suggest that Apple consider implementing a “no designing hardware while blind, stupid drunk” policy?

Time to get back to work.

After finally getting my keyboard set up as I like it and sitting down to code, I discovered a new feature of Emacs.app for OS X, kind of.  Placing the cursor on an opening or closing delimiter (paren, brace) highlights the whole expression by default.  Unfortunately the default color choice turns my screen unreadable every time I put the cursor on an opening brace of a long class definition, flashes the arguments of a function call every time I type it, and otherwise continually taunts me.

With the help of the emacs-app-dev- mailing list I discovered the the culprit is mic-paren.el, a lisp package that extends the usual paren matching package paren.el.  (setq paren-sexp-mode nil) has restored peace to my screen.

Thanks to the very wonderful KeyRemap4MacBook I now have a useable macbook pro! The “eisuu” and “kana” keys, on either side of the spacebar on japanese keyboards, are now mapped to control so I can emacs away with my thumbs. If you use emacs, doing this can save you a lot of pain, quite literally. No more nerve-pinching little-finger moves.