Raymond.CC Blog

Macro tools can definitely help you map a key on a keyboard to something else or even to perform a task for you. Unless you are one of the few people that make use of every key on your keyboard and are completely happy with your keyboard layout, there is probably something you would like to change on your keyboard. Maybe you have an IBM Thinkpad and you really miss having a Windows Logo key. Maybe you are used to using a different keyboard and you keep hitting the wrong key. Another example is the F3 key which will bing up Windows Search and I seldom use it. Since I don’t use it, why not I hack the key to do something more useful? Problem with using Macro program to map a key on a keyboard to something else is it has to be running to monitor the keystroke. If it’s closed, the mapping won’t work.

What if I want to change the key permanently? For example, make F3 key to act like the cool Apple eject key? Yes it’s possible to permanently make certain keys on a keyboard to act like other keys WITHOUT the need of a macro program running.


So how is it possible to hack the keyboard keys to act differently? Well, your keyboard communicates with your computer typically through a PS/2 port or a USB port. The data sent by your keyboard is referred to as Scan Codes. When you press a key, the “make” scan code for that key is received by your computer’s i8042 controller chip. When you release a key, the “break” scan code is sent. Prior to Windows 2000, device drivers had to be written to modify scan codes. Happily, Microsoft incorporated this feature into their operating system, thereby allowing us to hack registry and change the values to anything we see fit. Problem is manually editing the registry to do remapping can be quite tricky. Thankfully there are free tools to simplify this process…

Keytweak is a free keyboard remapper for Windows NT/2000/XP. It makes use of Microsoft’s Scancode Map registry key to remap your keyboard.

To change a key, click on a key on the visual keyboard first, then select a command from the “Choose New Remapping” dropdown menu. Then press Remap Key which is located beside the dropdown menu. Once you’re sure that’s the key that you want to remap, click Apply button and restart. Please take note that the key mappings affects every user. KeyTweak KeyTweak is not able to combine keystrokes into a single key. For example, when you press the Tab key, you want it to combine Windows + R key to bring up the Run command. That is not possible because it is for REMAPPING only.

[ Download KeyTweak ]

There’s another great free tool to map your keyboard keys and it’s called SharpKeys.

It works exactly the same as KeyTweak but it lacks of keyboard interface for you to easily identify the keys that you want to change. You can try SharpKeys to compare with KeyTweak and see which you’d prefer to use. Oh yes, nearly forget to mention that both KeyTweak and SharpKeys is able to scan the Scancode when you press a key. It’s called “Teach Mode” in KeyTweak and “Type Key” in SharpKeys.

[ Download SharpKeys ]

Found another one called MapKeyboard. This free keyboard remapper requires .NET Framework 2 installed. Very small, only 30KB in file size and no installation required.

[ Download MapKeyboard ]