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

[IainB]

Give yourself at least another 26 unique hotkey combos with Microsoft's remapkey (or other key remapping tool).

I was prompted to mention this upon reading this:

is it easy to change the hotkey combination?

what do you want to change it to?

[attachment 1 not found]

^This^ is the bit you need to change -- I always forget (I *think Ctrl='^'), and need to look up the AHK site.
I know from the screenshot that:
# = Winkey
and that's it....

so,
only half a solution -- or maybe just a quarter ;-)
__________________________

What sort of use would a ridiculous hotkey combo LeftShift+RightShift+I be?
For me, it is very useful, as I use that as an AHK hotkey to launch InfoSelect, and I use the combo LeftShift+RightShift+V to launch the VLC media player. The LeftShift+RightShift combo keys are very handy, as no-one in their right mind would generally have a use for that combo, so they are "all yours".

It's not that I have a huge hand span or anything. I select the LeftShift+RightShift keys with the first two fingers of my left hand, and the next character with right or left hand fingers, depending on where the key is.

I can do that by the simple expedient of remapping the RightShift key to the CapsLock key. Of course, if you have a use for the latter key, then another key would be required. The objective would be to give yourself a ridiculous pair of keys close together.

The only caveat I would have is that the Win10 updates seem to set the keyboard mappings back to the standard default - and they also restore file associations to the standard default too. Updates to earlier Windows OS versions didn't used to do those things.
Hope this tip helps or is of use to someone. It's been very useful to me.

[tomos]

Great idea
will have to check out MS's remapkey

[Nod5]

It's not that I have a huge hand span or anything. I select the LeftShift+RightShift keys with the first two fingers of my left hand ...

Judging from the second sentence you may have a much more huge hand than you think you have. Or typo. 

[4wd]

It's not that I have a huge hand span or anything. I select the LeftShift+RightShift keys with the first two fingers of my left hand ...

Judging from the second sentence you may have a much more huge hand than you think you have. Or typo. 

He qualifies that sentence in the next paragraph, remapping Right-Shift to Capslock, thus the two keys are next to each other.

[MilesAhead]

Plus with ahk you can do funky stuff with Hotstrings.  I think the only one I have used it for is a rare case when I want to select all text and copy it to clipboard, then call another program.  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. 

[Nod5]

He qualifies that sentence in the next paragraph, remapping Right-Shift to Capslock, thus the two keys are next to each other.

I sure missed that bit. The joke is on me!   

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

Code

<+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.

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. ...

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:

Code

CapsLock:: return

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

Code

CapsLock & d:: msgbox, CaspLock + D

Few 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

is brilliant. 

[IainB]

@mwb1100: Well, it's certainly very handy, and dead simple too. It's an ergonomic efficiency and effectiveness improvement really.

It's the only complex combo that I could construct where the key's function that you disable (CapsLock) is effectively only partially disabled (i.e., there's no Lock now) and yet it retains its usefulness for the useful part of its original function (Shift), plus you have it already physically located right next to the other Shift key (LeftShift), thus permitting a new two-left-fingers combo.

The net result from an ergonomics perspective is that the function of the CapsLock key has effectively only been modified slightly, so it behaves as a typical user might otherwise expect it to, and there are no more ALL CAPS mistakes and the (still three) Shift keys can be used interchangeably as Shift keys from the keyboard and in AHK.
In AHK it makes no difference which one you use as a purely Shift function key, but you can specify precisely which one you need, as necessary:

• +    = SHIFT - could be either a LeftSHIFT or RightSHIFT key.
• <+ = LeftSHIFT - there is still just one of these on the keyboard.
• >+ = RightSHIFT - there are two of these on the keyboard now.

Examples of my experiences, so far, of using Shift or Left/RightShift AHK hotkey combos:

To launch proggies:

• <+>+c:: ; LeftShift+RightShift+C-  loads Calculator.
• <+>+d:: ;LeftShift+RightShift+D - loads Concise Oxford Dictionary. - places any selected text in Clipboard and opens Concise Oxford Dictionary with it.
• <+>+f:: ; LShift+RShift+F - loads Firefox (does not work as SHIFT sensing brings up disable add-ons screen).
• <+>+e:: ;LeftShift+RightShift+E - loads Search Everything.
• <+>+`::    ; LeftShift+RightShift+`  - loads FARR (Tilde on its own brings up FARR if it is already running.
• <+>+g:: ; LeftShift+RightShift+G - loads GetRight.
• <+>+i:: ; LeftShift+RightShift+I - loads InfoSelect.
• <+>+n:: ; LeftShift+RightShift+n - loads Notepad (EditPad Lite 7) with 3 files, ready for editing.

To launch AHK utilities:

• >+#H:: ; RightSHIFT+Win+H - Display panel of Windows system hotkeys.
• >+#O:: ; RightSHIFT+Win+O - Display panel of OneNote hotkeys per OneNote Help.
• <+^d::  ; LeftShift+Ctrl+d - outputs current date+time.
• <+^H:: ; LeftShift+Ctrl+h - displays Autohotkey Help file.
• <+^r:: ; LeftShift+Ctrl+R - Reloads/Restarts Autohotkey main script.

[cranioscopical]

It's the only complex combo that I could construct where the key's function that you disable (CapsLock) is effectively only partially disabled (i.e., there's no Lock now) and yet it retains its usefulness for the useful part of its original function (Shift), plus you have it already physically located right next to the other Shift key (LeftShift), thus permitting a new two-left-fingers combo.

I admire your thinking! Thanks for sharing this.

[IainB]

Just thought to mention/confirm in this thread that in Win10-64 (Standard and Pro), major Windows Updates sometimes expunge the Registry settings made by remapkey.exe, restoring the keys to the relevant system defaults. So, the user needs to re-run remapkey.exe and repeat the settings changes all over again, then reboot the PC.

This is no trouble for me as I only remap the CapsLock key as described above, and I also remap the RightCtrl key (which one usually tends to have little or no use for) to Del - if the keyboard in question does not already have a delete key near that position, as increasingly seems to be the case with laptop keyboards (they tend to have the Del key in the Numpad.

Cross-posted from: Re: Mini-review of 1-hour software by Skrommel: CAPshift v1.7 and ShiftOff

Note that Microsoft's remapkey.exe can still be downloaded from here: remapkey.exe (click the link).
The contents of the file cannot be displayed. Just press the "Download" button when you get to the link, and it downloads with that file name.