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'Home' and 'End' and 'FN'.

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pilgrim:
I'm not clear pilgrim - are you also against the AHK idea (if that could work) ?
replacing home (Fn+Home) with an easier combination, e.g. Ctrl+Home-tomos (May 16, 2013, 04:34 AM)
--- End quote ---

It is one of the things I need to look into further and Ctrl+Home/End would in many ways be ideal as the right Ctrl key is next to the Home key, my concern is not losing the funtion of the FN key for everything else it is connected to.
(Not to mention screwing up the entire keyboard.) :(
Based on my brief previous experiences with AHK it might take me a while but I shall certainly have a look at it.

Stoic Joker:
Not sure what your keyboard layout is, but some of those devices have a (BIOS) setting that allows the default (Fn key)state to be set between the usual function keys and the special device keys state. Because some people never use the F1-12 keys...and some depend on them.

Just a thought.

evamaria:
"my concern is not losing the funtion of the FN key for everything else it is connected to"

It seems I wasn't enough specific by saying, forget the Fn key. What I meant was with everything you do with Home, End, whatever, you will NOT SHIFT these functions elsewhere, you will just REPLICATE them elsewhere: If you're crazy enough to do so, you could have 2 dozen of different Home and End keys on your kb, and even have 40 of them will not make you lose these from your Fn combinations.

"they obviously send a command to the OS, presumably to a DLL or an EXE file"

I think I get what you're asking for. Key pressings send scancodes to somewhere, and they can be intercepted by all these third-party things that persistently monitor the system for that, but its either remapping (you don't want) OR having additional things running and monitoring (that's what you call "Not to mention screwing up the entire keyboard", and in fact, these tools persistently monitor ALL of your keys, even if you just change 2 or 3 assignments - they are not selective here), there isn't a third way. Hence the beauty of the additional keypad solution in your case.

But I very much hope that some expert here could give an answer WHY there is not a single such program that that just intercepts the pressings of 1 or 2 specific keys, then sends particular scancodes - because technically, this should be possible, and with additional keys, it is. So from a logical point of view, some spcified keys should be taken OUT of this automatic processing of all keys present (by what Windows routine?), and be processed then by tiny, particular software just working for these keys that without this particular treatment would be "dead" now. I suppose that doesn't exist simply because the overhead of monitoring all keys permanently, on modern computers, isn't a problem anymore, and because once you will have started to reassign  SOME keys, you quickly will want "more". Or is there a techical problem that prevents such partial solutions? This being said, remapping is very limited, no key combinations, and not many concurrent remaps possible, either, just five or so. Which leads us to the question why there isn't any available "general table" for assigning all scancodes freely to all these keys to begin with - perhaps another fault in the Windows design.

pilgrim:
Not sure what your keyboard layout is, but some of those devices have a (BIOS) setting that allows the default (Fn key)state to be set between the usual function keys and the special device keys state. Because some people never use the F1-12 keys...and some depend on them.

Just a thought.-Stoic Joker (May 16, 2013, 06:36 AM)
--- End quote ---

It's a Samsung NC10, the BIOS is extremely limited compared to others I've seen, I've got a copy of the manual on it, I'll look it up.

"my concern is not losing the funtion of the FN key for everything else it is connected to"

It seems I wasn't enough specific by saying, forget the Fn key. What I meant was with everything you do with Home, End, whatever, you will NOT SHIFT these functions elsewhere, you will just REPLICATE them elsewhere: If you're crazy enough to do so, you could have 2 dozen of different Home and End keys on your kb, and even have 40 of them will not make you lose these from your Fn combinations.

"they obviously send a command to the OS, presumably to a DLL or an EXE file"

I don't know the depths of Windows programming I'm afraid, but this is not obvious to me, or it's a misunderstanding. Key pressings send scancodes to somewhere, and they can be intercepted by all these third-party things that persistently monitor the system for that, but its either remapping (you don't want) OR having additional things running and monitoring (that's what you call "Not to mention screwing up the entire keyboard", and in fact, these tools persistently monitor ALL of your keys, even if you just change 2 or 3 assignments - they are not selective here), there isn't a third way. Hence the beauty of the additional keypad solution in your case.
-evamaria (May 16, 2013, 06:49 AM)
--- End quote ---

Thank you for the clarification. I will definitely have a look at AHK, if I can work out what I need to do I can compile it on my PC and copy it across.

evamaria:
Sorry, you got the old version of my post; of course you're right, it's just the interceptability of these command transfers that I wanted to express. My general question (to some experts in these things that must be here, too!) is, there are various "kb layouts" from MS you can switch between, and independently of your "system language" - so WHY there isn't such a thing as an alternative FREE KB LAYOUT (be it from MS, be it from a third-party developer), in which the user would  assign his individual scan codes to each key (perhaps starting from a US "default" layout which is then adjusted in various ways), and which conceptionally would be TOTALLY DIFFERENT from all these macro / scripting things today that all INTERCEPT scan code transmission - in such an "individual kb layout", as in any of all these French, Spanish, whatever kb layouts, there is NO such interception and obvious "scan code replacing" running, but DIRECT scan code transmission (to whatever in Windows then "processes" these).

Any insight about this, from some real expert?

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