A little disappointing to hear that the board has issues with karabiner. My plan is to use it on my work machine (windows), but I was hoping to use it at home (OS X) sometimes as well. I wonder if it will have similar issues with key tweak in windows as thats what I currently use to remap caps lock/control and backslash/backspace. I'm told adding teensy's to QFR is fairly straight forward. I wonder how hard it will be with the novatouch.
Odd, I was just able to swap Caps lock and control using Seil (http://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html). You cannot do it with Karabiner itself because apparently it's a "special" key. I also had to change Caps Lock in the keyboard system preference to "No Action". I didn't try with the key tweak application, but I can give it a go to see how it works.
I'll let you know what I find out.
Edit: I was able to swap Capslock and Control easily with AutoHotKey. I don't know what this Key Tweak is, but it looked too spyware'ish to me so I didn't bother.
Apologies for double-posting, but I have made some progress with remapping and I wanted to update my findings.
First, I was able to use Karabiner in combination with Mac keyboard prefs to remap most things to my liking. This includes reassigning CapsLock to Control and reassigning Left Control to Fn. Although I rarely need CapsLock, I now have Fn+Tab = CapsLock. Among other remappings, I now have swapped Backslash and Backspace and Alt and Win; Win is now Command and Alt is Option. And by the way, all this works without connecting the keyboard directly to my Mac Pro -- I use an Iogear KM switch along with Synergy. Moreover, the KM switch is connected to a USB hub.
I notice that the Novatouch shows up in the Mac keyboard prefs as just "Keyboard", whereas my other keyboards are recognized by name, such as "Realforce 87" and "HHKB Professional". CM might want to update its ID function to personalize the board, giving it a name like "Novatouch".
Unfortunately, the Novatouch has a hardwired Fn key that does not issue a scan code, and so it cannot be remapped and it cannot be used in new combinations of Fn+XXX to yield some new function. Consequently, the Fn key on my Novatouch is a dead key. I really wanted to remap it as Right Control, but I can live without this, given that I now have two Control keys on the left side of the keyboard.
Luckily my RF 87u does not start out with a Fn key, and so the Menu key is now Right Control and Right Control is Fn. Because a user-created Fn key issues a scan code, I can remap it or use it in new functional combinations to my heart's content. Moreover, there are no dead keys on my RF 87u.
Despite the Fn key issue and the fact that the CM Novatouch does not really sound or feel like a Topre keyboard to me, it is growing on me. I certainly like it better than any Cherry mx keyboard I have tried, and so I finally have a board that I can use with my various Cherry mx keycap sets. At present, I have populated the keys using two sets of dye-sub thick PBT keycaps that I got from geek_feng some time ago. The alphas are blue with black legends and the mods are gray/beige with black legends. It looks and feels rather good. This adds up to making my Novatouch an expensive board ($200 for the board and over $200 for the caps), but I suppose we enthusiasts expect to deplete our wallets in our quest for keyboard nirvana.
