Remap curved quotation marks in OS X? So, the default key combinations to manually insert curved quotation marks (“” and ‘’) in OS X are:


option + [ for “
option + ] for ‘
option + shift + [ for ”
option + shift + ] for ’


Possibly due to muscle memory and the mental association with the keys ([ being an "opening" symbol and ] being a "closing" one) I find this specific setup very confusing, so I'll always get it wrong when inserting curved quotation marks manually. And have to try all combinations until I get the right quote.

What I would like to achieve is the (IMO) more intuitive setup:


option + [ for “
option + ] for ”
option + shift + [ for ‘
option + shift + ] for ’


What setting/file/app I need to fiddle with to remap these characters? Is there a special keyboard layout I can download that will do this for me? Thanks in advance.

PS: I'm aware of the "smart quotes" feature, but I'd like to have more fine grained control, that's why I want the manual insertion to be intuitive for me.
You can use KeyRemap4MacBook with a private.xml such as this:

&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
&lt;root&gt;
  &lt;item&gt;
    &lt;name&gt;Manual Smart Quotes&lt;/name&gt;
    &lt;identifier&gt;ManualSmartQuotes&lt;/identifier&gt;
    &lt;autogen&gt;
      __KeyToKey__
      KeyCode::BRACKET_RIGHT, VK_OPTION | ModifierFlag::NONE,
      KeyCode::BRACKET_LEFT, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L | ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L
    &lt;/autogen&gt;
    &lt;autogen&gt;
      __KeyToKey__
      KeyCode::BRACKET_LEFT, VK_OPTION, | ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L,
      KeyCode::BRACKET_RIGHT, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L
    &lt;/autogen&gt;
  &lt;/item&gt;
&lt;/root&gt;