Delete or swap those annoying keys
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
SLOAN Ranger
Delete or swap those annoying keys
You can make your PC that bit more personal by remapping your keyboard
Only you know what tiny thing drives you crazy. But one of the common PC peeves is the key that’s always in your way.
Changing individual key assignments with SharpKey is as simple as choosing which key to change on the left, and picking the new assignment of your choice on the right.
A common irritation: You might wish your Caps Lock was a simple Caps key aFTER THE 12TH TIME YOU … you get the idea.
Or, there’s the reader’s complaint that triggered this column, that he wished the Insert key could be replaced or relocated so it would not be so easy to brush. It continually seems to leave him typing over earlier prose instead of inserting a new word or sentence.
Well, you can change around your keyboard in minor ways. The geeks call it “remapping”, and it’s pretty easy to do on Windows, DOS and Unix computers.
Under Windows, for example, just start up the Registry editor, and in the entry for Caps Lock under the Hkey Local Machine section. You can start a new Reg-Binary entry, or edit the specific DWord entry, remembering to use the Endian format. Sure you can. Heck, anyone can do that, right? Well, maybe, but not in this column.
If you want to remap annoying keys easily, one of the two most useful tools I have ever found is from Microsoft itself.
Remapkey.exe is the modest description of a small and extremely well thought out utility that is actually a kind of after-thought to an obscure collection of utilities available to everyone, but promoted by Microsoft about as heavily as a disco advertises bottled water on its ladies’ night drink menus.
It comes as part of a collection known as Windows 2003 Server Tools, which would normally create all the excitement among normal people of a truck driver fleeing an accident scene.
In fact, there are several small utilities that could be useful to Windows users, although Remapkey is what we want today.
To get the keyboard remapper from the official Microsoft site, you will have to download all the tools, meaning you have to collect 11MB of stuff to get the tiny 340KB program you really want. This is not as horrible as it sounds. It should only take a few minutes at worst, and the download is self-installing. The toolkit is free to all by the way, none of those checks to see if your Windows is authentic, and the tools themselves work on XP and Vista at least - just go to this Microsoft web page: tinyurl.com/4k28b.
Take a look at what you will be getting. When you’re ready, just click Download and follow instructions. Eventually you should have a new folder with all the utilities in it at C:\Program Files \Windows Resource Kits \Tools. And in the Tools sub-folder you’ll find Remapkey.exe. Just double-click to start it, as with any program.
Let’s say you hate the current Insert key. On the top keyboard, click Ins, drag it to the bottom, and drop it on a key you don’t use much or ever (in my example the “0″ on the numbers pad) or a so-called dead key such as Shift. Then click Save and Exit.
All that happens, as you see from the warning, is that the Remapkey writes your changes to the Registry. Heck, you could do that, right? Yes, of course, if you had a lot of knowledge, a computer manual and the confidence to edit your Registry files.
SharpKeys is an incredibly small (23KB for the .ZIP file) freeware utility which does exactly the same thing as Remapkey, but looks different. It also has one very useful addition that the Microsoft authors should have thought of.
When you start this program, you have, basically, a blank screen. Click on “Add” to really get started.
On the left is your current keyboard. On the right is what you want it to be. And here is where I think SharpKeys is just that little sliver better than Remapkey, even though it doesn’t look as spiffy. One of the things you can do with your dreadful key - or keys, plural - is make them dead, or, as the program puts it, turn the keys off by giving them the scan code of four zeroes.
In the example shown, nothing will happen when you press the Insert key one you have used SharpKeys to turn it off. SharpKeys has a home page at the somewhat eccentric RandyRants.com. There is a specific link to the utility in the far right margin.
If you truly love irony, here’s this morning’s dose: SharpKeys’ author Randy (no last name given) works at the Microsoft headquarters at Redmond, Washington.
I like both of these standalone utilities for this simple but sometimes immensely satisfying job of changing keyboard assignments. They are small and be stored anywhere.
Email: wandasloan@gmail.com
