Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Maxwell asks:
For years now, I have used a program (originally based on someone else's, but with very little of their code any more) to remap the control keys to cursor keys: ^K is the up arrow, ^H is the left arrow, etc., and ^Q sets a toggle so that ^K is shift-up arrow, etc. (until it gets another ^Q, or ^C or etc.). There's lots of other nasty stuff, like the first ^A is Home, a second ^A (with no intervening keystrokes) brings you to the top of the screen, and a third to the top of the file (this is modeled after what <HOME> did in the old 'brief' editor). My fingers know all these things, and it's painful if I have to do without this remapper.This program operates by hooking the keyboard msgs using SetWindowsHookEx(WH_KEYBOARD, ...), then translating the control keys. For various reasons, it would be better if it were a standard Keyboard Layout. But I don't know how to build one of those from scratch. I was hoping your Ms Keyboard Layout Creator would let me do that, but so far as I can tell it only allows you to define keys as outputting Unicode characters. Very nice, but not what I want...I don't suppose that modifying the Layout Creator to allow one to specify e.g. VK_DOWN in the output is going to happen any time soon, right? If not, can you point me to a better way to do what I'm doing than hooking the keyboard msgs? Thanks!
There isn't a happy answer to this question -- it is roughly the same as the answer to the question answered in the post Why doesn't MSKLC have a numeric keypad?
And the reasoning is roughly the same -- that this is not really a language feature. So it really was not in the mandate that put together MSKLC.
Certainly this is a scenario which (like the numeric keypad) can perhaps be considered in some future release. Though it may be a hard sell for all of the reasons given in that other post.
I don't know of specific better soloutions myself, but people have talked about key mappers in the past. Perhaps someone has a suggestion?
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