Yesterday I was reading Jeff Atwood's blog (on Keyboarding) and I thought I´d try one more time to find a nice tool to remap the keyboard.

See, when you use non-english keyboards you tend to start wondering about why would you need to press Ctll-Alt and 2 just to type the @ char, while you have keys mapped to symbols you never use: the spanish keyboard, for example, has keys mapped to º, ª, ç, Ç, and so-called "dead-keys" so you can press them and then type a, e, i, o, u and get the accented version of those chars, THREE of them we never use in spanish: `, ^ and ~; ç and Ç are only used in portuguese!

I always wanted the ability to remap these keys into characters that would be a lot more useful while coding, so I had tried several approachs before, including Chris Sells Scancode Mapper, but those only allow you to remap entire keys, they don't really allow to modify the characters that appear when you 'modify' them with Shift or Ctrl-Alt (AltGr).

Enter the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). KLC allows you to create a new Windows keyboard layout from scratch or customize a preexisting one, and build an MSI installer for it. You can then simply install it and configure Windows to use your custom layout.

The main window presents you with the representation of a standard keyboard (if your keyboard has an L shaped enter key you can change the physical layout so it represents your keyboard in the View... Options menu).

You can then double click any key to enter the new character that should be sent to Windows when it's pressed. If you changed the state by marking "Shift" on the main window, when you do this you'll be changing the character that will be sent when Shift and that key are pressed.

You can either simply enter the new character that should be sent, or enter it's Unicode number (UTF-16 code point).

If you want to go deeper, you can expand the key properties window (by pressing the All... button), so you get access to change the normal, shift, ctrl+alt (AltGr), shift+ctrl+alt, SGCAPS, etc, and to define your own Dead-keys.

Defining a dead key is straight-forward: just enter the normal characters that should be pressed after the dead-key, and the resulting characters that should be sent.

You can preload any installed Windows keyboard layout so you don't don't forget about any essential character.

Once you've defined your own keyboard layout, you can build the installer for it (Project... Build DLL and Setup Package), and proceed to install it.

Once you have it installed, all you need to do is open Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and configure Windows to use your new layout.

Looks like the brand-new antispyware tool from Microsoft is written in (or at least has components written in...) Visual Basic 6!

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/johnwood/archive/2005/01/06/42086.aspx

Introduction to the new MSN Toolbar Suite (http://beta.toolbar.msn.com). Let's face it: an almost exact copy of Copernic Desktop Search... although it introduces shortcuts which is a nice feature that makes this product worth the trouble on its own.

Introducing MSN Toolbar Suite - Silicon Valley team (and demo!)

I personally just hide the IE toolbar (I prefer Google web search for obvious reasons), but enable the deskbar (disabling the buttons with the registry tweak bellow) so I can access any item on my pc (documents/files/emails/contacts) or run any program (through "shortcuts") just typing two or three keys.

Registry tweak to hide the deskbar buttons:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSN Apps\DB
Add a DWORD value with the name of "Buttons" and value "1".

  1. Open the ie4shl95.cab or ie4shlnt.cab file in Winzip or any archiving utility and extract all the files inside onto a temporary folder (for example 'c:tempie4shell').
    2. Create a batch file in Notepad with the following lines:
        @echo off
        start /w RUNDLL32.EXE ADVPACK.DLL,LaunchINFSection ie4shell.inf,DefaultInstall
        cls
    3. Save the file as an 'install.bat' file and place it onto the temporary folder where you store the IE Desktop Update
        setup files.
    4. Double-click on the INSTALL.BAT file to install the Desktop Update and reboot the computer when setup is done.

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