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Give yourself at least another 26 unique hotkey combos with Microsoft's remapkey

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Nod5:
He qualifies that sentence in the next paragraph, remapping Right-Shift to Capslock, thus the two keys are next to each other.
-4wd (January 17, 2016, 04:04 PM)
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I sure missed that bit. The joke is on me!  :-[  ;D

I guess I missed it because with Autohotkey we can already make a hotkey combo out of Left Shift + CapsLock + some other key without remapping Right Shift. For example

--- ---<+d::
if GetKeyState("CapsLock", P)
 msgbox, you pressed Left Shift + CapsLock + D
else
 msgbox, you pressed Left Shift + + D
return

IainB:
@MilesAhead:
...In this case I hit qq<tab> where the tab key is designated as the key to terminate hotstring sequences.  Another program is not likely to use it as an accelerator sequence.
-MilesAhead (January 17, 2016, 04:43 PM)
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Thanks. I didn't know that about <tab>. That's a nifty idea.

@Nod5:
...we can already make a hotkey combo out of Left Shift + CapsLock + some other key without remapping Right Shift. ...
-Nod5 (January 18, 2016, 06:42 AM)
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I should probably have mentioned that, with the original objective of getting rid of CapsLock (which I found to be a really annoying key and one for which I had no use), I just remapped it with LeftShift. Then when I later found myself running up against conflicting key combos already in use - i.e., being grabbed by Windows or different applications - I belatedly realised that by remapping CapsLock to RightShift instead, I could get 26+ unique and "infeasible" key combos that no system proggy or application was likely to want.

Nod5:
IanB: I see. One advantage with your approach is that it won't interfere with any LeftShift+D type hotkeys built in to the active application whereas in my code sketch those would have to be recreated in the code. Though such collisions can often be limited with #IfWinActive conditions.

If anyone is going down the autohotkey route then the CapsLock default behaviour can be easily disabled:

--- ---CapsLock:: returnAfter that we can use it as a hotkey modifier by itself. So instead of LeftShift + CapsLock + D we'd only press CapsLock + D.

--- ---CapsLock & d:: msgbox, CaspLock + DFew programs (that I use at least) make use of CapsLock and we can still toggle uppercase on/off with Win+CapsLock. The same can be done with the key below Esc if it by default has a special character that isn't used a lot (the tilde character on british/american layouts I think).

It is fun to figure out new useful hotkey combos!

IainB:
The reason I originally mapped CapsLock to LeftShift was to improve the ergonomics for users - to disable the unwanted lock function, whilst still leaving the Shift function intact - so that users could still rely on a Shift function if they hit CapsLock by mistake. So nothing really changed for the user, except they made no ALL CAPS mistakes anymore. (Most users would be unlikely to require to type ALL CAPS anyway, as it is bad practice, and there's a font for that if they needed it.)

When I twigged that by mapping it to RightShift instead I could get the same Shift function and the 26+ unique key combos, I was quite pleased in that you'd have to deliberately press the newly-remapped CapsLock+LeftShift + Alpha key, and it would be relatively unlikely to occur by accident. So no accidental triggers.

@Nod5: Though I quite like your idea of making CapsLock effectively "null" unless pressed together with another alpha key, I couldn't recommend adopting it as general practice, as, from an ergonomics perspective, it is a bit risky - i.e., not foolproof. That is because its function becomes quite changed to what would be expected and users are still just as likely to unwittingly hold down the CapsLock key or the LeftShift key, together with an alpha key, when wanting to type capital letters. So they could be inadvertently triggering applications by chance all the time!

I test all these things out on my kids' PCs first, before recommending them as general practice. ...

mwb1100:
I just started reading this thread, even though I don't really use much in the way of hotkeys.  But this:

remapping the RightShift key to the CapsLock key
-IainB (January 16, 2016, 05:30 PM)
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is brilliant. 

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