How can I use registers on macOS Tahoe with my keyboard set to Brazilian?

[alienbogart]

I confirm that...

• I searched the FAQ, issue tracker, discussions board, documentation, and wiki, and did not find an answer to my question.

• Any discussions with or conclusions derived from the use of LLMs will be omitted from my question.

What is your question?

I am running Doom Emacs on Emacs 31.1 and macOS Tahoe 26.6.2. My keyboard is set to Brazilian (my nationality). As said above, hitting " on normal or visual mode will literally print "so I cannot use registers.

Now that I think of it, evil-goto-mark and any command like that also doesn't work. I just checked Homebrew, and apparently I installed the version emacs-plus-app.

Any solution for that?

Thanks!

System information

• Emacs 31.1
• macOS Tahoe 26.6.2
• emacs-plus-app (via Homebrew)

Doom Info

generated  Sep 03, 2026 22:08:10
system     MacOS 26.6.2 Darwin 25.6.0 arm64 ns
emacs      31.1 HEAD a360712c9 EMACSDIR=~/.config/emacs/
           EMACS=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs
doom       2.2.2 PROFILE=_default@0 grafted, HEAD -> master, origin/master,
           origin/HEAD ad55ed08d 2026-08-06 19:54:48 -0400 ~/.config/doom/
shell      /bin/bash
features   ACL GLIB GNUTLS JPEG LCMS2 LIBXML2 MODULES NATIVE_COMP NOTIFY KQUEUE NS
           PDUMPER PNG RSVG SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER WEBP
           XIM XWIDGETS ZLIB
traits     gui daemon server-running envvar-file custom-file
custom     connection-local-criteria-alist connection-local-profile-alist
           safe-local-variable-values denote-keywords-to-not-infer-regexp
sources    (doomemacs/modules . HEAD, tag: v26.08 5c89315d5 2026-08-02 01:02:08 -0400)
modules    :doom (compat +keybinds +better-jumper +projectile +smartparens)
           :completion (corfu +orderless) vertico :ui doom (modeline +light) ophints
           (popup +defaults) (vc-gutter +pretty) window-select workspaces (zen +focus)
           :editor (evil +everywhere) file-templates fold snippets (whitespace +guess
           +trim) :emacs electric undo vc :checkers syntax :tools (eval +overlay)
           lookup :os macos :lang emacs-lisp markdown org sh :config literate (default
           +bindings +smartparens)
packages   (denote) (consult-notes) (avy) (denote-org) (hydra) (super-save)
           (flycheck-languagetool :disable t) (nov :disable t) (evil-snipe :disable t)
           (engine-mode :disable t) (evil-better-visual-line :disable t)

[hlissner]

1. It only needs to be set in normal mode, not visual mode,
2. :leader is special. You can't scope them to particular evil states so :nv are ignored,
3. evil-use-register will not work on a non-evil keymap.

This will work:

(map! :n "y" #'evil-use-register)

[alienbogart]

I see. No way to just use " like before?

[hlissner]

I'm not familiar enough with MacOS to know what will work, but you can try to identify what key Emacs receives (evaluate (read-event) then press your " key), then try remapping that key to " with:

;;; in $DOOMDIR/config.el
(define-key key-translation-map ?X ?")  ; replace ?X with the keycode

EDIT: If key-translation-map doesn't work, try input-decode-map.

[hlissner]

Or you can remap it at the OS level with Karabiner.

[alienbogart]

Okay thanks!