Some time ago, I bought an Apple Keyboard to use with both my PC and iBook. Compared to a traditional PC keyboard, this one includes extra function keys (from F13 to F16) and some multimedia ones, but does not provide those that are PC-specific and which are very rarely used even in, for example, Windows. One of such keys is Print Screen; I needed this key to take a screenshot of my desktop a couple of days ago and couldn't find a quick way to do it otherwise.
In order to solve the problem, I searched for information on how to remap keys in Windows. It turns out that doing so manually is quite complex because you need to fiddle with a cryptic key in the registry (how not!). Fortunately, there is a little free utility that simplifies this process: SharpKeys.
This tool lets you remap any physical key on your keyboard to any other one you can imagine. To my surprise, you can even remap your keys to those multimedia functions found in new keyboards, which comes great to control the media player. For example: F14 to go to the previous track, F15 to toggle between play and pause and F16 to go to the next track. I have been using a similar setup to control iTunes with SizzlingKeys and is certainly a comfortable configuration.
Think about it: your keyboard surely has some keys that you do not ever use and which could be mapped to become useful! (And this applies to any OS.)
Hmm... too much Windows-related posts in a row. The next one will be different; promise!
Ah, that's useful, thanks for the hint. I'll see if I can use it to remap "Caps Lock" to "Backspace" at work (win2k), as I do in X-Windows at home and everywhere else. :-) (who uses Caps Lock anyway?)
ReplyDeleteI find myself using Caps Locks when writing macros and constant names in C. It was quite annoying to write those in my old iBook when I used NetBSD. (But of course, one can easily get used to regular Shift and use Caps Lock for something more useful.)
ReplyDeletedoes anyone know how to do a screenshot on a macbook under windows?
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody know of a tool that lets you do such a physical key remap for the Mac? (Macbook Pro to be exact)? please let me know at tomasz (at) tarchala (dot) com.
ReplyDeleteExcellent. Thanks, it works great!
ReplyDeleteThanks! This is an awesome idea, I'd been scouring the net for a reasonable solution, and this is the best one I've found so far.
ReplyDeleteOthers did indeed recommend fiddling with the registry values and binaries, and I wasn't really comfortable with doing that manually.