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Microsoft Windows Keyboard remapping

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Remapping the Caps Lock key to Ctrl on your keyboard increase productivity and make keyboard more Sun-like.  It is highly recommended. Capability of remapping keys is present in Microsoft Windows registry. All you need is some helper to do it quickly and correctly. There are several different helpers that provide GUI interface for such remapping:

Along with remapping Ctrl to Caps-Lock which correct a long-standing defect in design of Windows keyboard (compare pressing Ctrl-C using regular Ctrl and remapped Caps-Lock and you will instantly understand what I am talking about) there are three other useful Windows key combination that can be remapped are (some keyboards have additional buttons that can be used for that):

Microsoft has a special page with keyboard shortcuts: Keyboard shortcuts for Windows. It contain quite a bit of information that probably none of us suspect can exists taken into account Microsoft preoccupation with GUI.  But paradoxically the company is very keyboard friendly ;-). And always was. Still friendliness aside, life is too short to learn all those combinations so please be selective.  See also Microsoft Windows shortcuts

General keyboard shortcuts

Dialog box keyboard shortcuts

If you press SHIFT+F8 in extended selection list boxes, you enable extended selection mode. In this mode, you can use an arrow key to move a cursor without changing the selection. You can press CTRL+SPACEBAR or SHIFT+SPACEBAR to adjust the selection. To cancel extended selection mode, press SHIFT+F8 again. Extended selection mode cancels itself when you move the focus to another control.

Microsoft natural keyboard shortcuts

Windows Explorer keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut keys for Character Map

After you double-click a character on the grid of characters, you can move through the grid by using the keyboard shortcuts:

Microsoft Management Console (MMC) main window keyboard shortcuts

MMC console window keyboard shortcuts

Remote desktop connection navigation

Microsoft Internet Explorer navigation

Other information

Some keyboard shortcuts may not work if StickyKeys is turned on in Accessibility Options.

Some of the Terminal Services client shortcuts that are similar to the shortcuts in Remote Desktop Sharing are not available when you use Remote Assistance in Windows XP Home Edition.

Some of the other Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that have similar information as this article are:

126449 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449/) Keyboard shortcuts for Windows

255090 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255090/) Keystroke navigation in Windows 2000 Help

Refer to Help for the most current information regarding keyboard navigation and visit the following Microsoft Accessibility Web site for additional information that relates to keyboard shortcuts and keyboard navigation in Windows and other Microsoft products:


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Old News ;-)

[Nov 11, 2008] RandyRants SharpKeys:

An excellent small utility. High recommended...

SharpKeys is a Registry hack that is used to make certain keys on a keyboard act like other keys. For example, if you accidentally hit Caps Lock often, you could use this utility to map Caps Lock to a Shift...

[Nov 11, 2008] RandyRants Remap Mouse Buttons

Remap Mouse Buttons

SharpKeys: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 at 03:25 PM by Randy


X-Button Mouse Control: X-Mouse Button Control is a windows application to remap your mouse buttons.
This software is designed and written for Microsoft Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition but I have also, from version 1.5, built a 32bit version.

You are able to provide an application specific mappings, which means one application can use the mouse differently from another. This is useful for games which do not inherently support the extended mouse buttons, because you can map keys to each button.

A number of people that have looked at SharpKeys have asked me about remapping mouse buttons... I haven't tried it but it looks like it would get the job done.

Remap Capslock - The Most Useless Key jon lee dot see eh

The Caps Lock key on your keyboard is frequently renowned as the most useless key. Even the One Laptop Per Child laptops have dismissed the caps lock key in favor of a more ergonomic Ctrl key! Well perhaps it is not as useless as Scroll Lock but it is taking up very valuable keyboard estate in its current position. Amongst all keys in close proximity to a touch typist's hand placement, caps lock is by far the least used (if typing correctly).

Anything caps lock does can be done by the shift key and more efficiently - except when you're writing something in all caps, which should be quite rarely. Case in point, I had a friend that refused to use the shift key for reasons unknown. If he had to capitalize a letter, he would press caps lock, type the letter and press caps lock again to turn it off. Some would argue caps lock is important for the disabled with poor motor-control but Window's "sticky keys" is a much better solution for them anyway.

No Caps LockWhat can it be remapped to?

How to remap Caps Lock to another key
For Linux users (on an X environment like KDE, Gnome), it's pretty easy to remap keys using the xmodmap command.

For Windows users, there are programs that will remap keys for you but if you're not afraid to tinker with your registry, you can do this manually and it only requires adding one registry value:

  1. Go to Start->Run and type in 'regedit' to open the registry editor.
  2. Navigate to:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout
    Note: Keyboard Layout, not Keyboard Layouts!

  3. Go to Edit->New->Binary Value and name it 'Scancode Map'
  4. Now double-click and edit the value to the following, replacing ## ## with the scan code of the key you wish to map caps lock to.

    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 ## ## 3a 00 00 00 00 00

    The scan code for Windows Key is 5B E0, Esc is 01 00, Ctrl is 1D 00. Full list of scan codes and a more detailed tutorial is here.

  5. Reboot your computer and say goodbye to caps lock!

How often do you use the caps lock key? Got another candidate for the most useless key? Have you remapped caps lock to something else? Leave a comment!

Annoyances.org - re Question about 'Customize Your Keyboard Mapping' (Windows XP Discussion Forum)

re: Question about 'Customize Your Keyboard Mapping'
Wednesday, March 27, 2002 at 11:09 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Craig Leres (1 messages posted)

Here's how I disabled the caps lock on my IBM X22 Windows XP system. My solution was to map caps lock to left shift. As previously noted, this should also work for Windows NT and and Windows 2000.

Scan Code Mapper for Windows is documented here:

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/input/w2kscan-map.asp

This page doesn't give the scan code for left shift; I found that here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q59131

Here are the scan codes given on this page:

ctrl 0x1D
alt 0x38
left shift 0x2A
right shift 0x36

The map value is as follows:

00000000 header version (zero)
00000000 header flags (zero)
00000002 number of entries (including terminator)
003A002A map caps lock (0x3A) to left shift (0x2A)
00000000 null terminator map

If you want to just disable caps lock, map it to zero (0x00) instead of left shift (0x2A).

Converting these values to little endian you have:

00000000 00000000 0200000000 2A003A00 00000000

Now fire up regedit and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout

Create a REG_BINARY entry called Scancode Map with the value calculated above. After you enter the values, the "modify" window should look like this:

Value Name:
Scancode Map

Value data:

0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0008 02 00 00 00 2A 00 3A 00
0010 00 00 00 00
Exit regedit, reboot and test.
Written in response to:
re: Question about 'Customize Your Keyboard Mapping' (Scott S: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 at 4:13 am)

Remap Caps Lock and Left Control on Windows XP David Stanek's Digressions

Unfortunately I am stuck using Windows XP at work. Every other machine I use is Linux. To increase productivity I have always mapped the Caps Lock key to Control and vice versa. I almost never use the Caps Locks and very frequently use Control so it was an obvious change.

However, under Windows this is not very easy. It took lots of Google searching to find the solution. Save the following to caps-control.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,1D,00,3A,00,3A,00,1D,00,00,00,00,00,00

Simply right-click the file and tell Windows to merge the changes into the registry. The changes will take effect only after a reboot. Once I found the initial solution finding addition resources on the topic was easy.

Tip #75 - Remap CAPSLOCK key in Windows 2000 Professional and NT4.0 vim online

created:June 7, 2001 5:54 complexity:basic author: Igor Prischepof as of Vim: 5.7

If you're Windows 2000 Professional user and got tired to move your hands off basic row when hitting <ESC> key
here the solution (not for Windows 9x.):
remap CapsLock key as <ESC> key. It's located in useful position.
Put this lines into <EscLock.reg> file and start it in explorer.Reboot.Enjoy.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

To restore you capslock back just delete this entry from Registry and reboot.
And below is remapping <capslock> as <Left Control>:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

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Created Jan 2, 1997. Last modified: March 12, 2019