Hacker News Reader

Comment by bubbab | Hacker News Reader

I use PowerToys just for the easy key remapping, which I wish was a built-in feature in more keyboards. Works very nicely as a simple alternative to AutoHotKey. My RSI has gotten a lot better by just remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl.

If any PowerToys feature deserves to be added to Windows, it's gotta be the Keyboard Manager.

View on HN

Key shortcut remapping should absolutely be a base feature of every single OS for accessibility reasons.

Back when I used to use Adobe Fireworks there was a shortcut for flattening the current selection, I believe it was cmd+ctrl+shift+Z and I'm pressing this hundreds of times a week and eventually it gave me RSI.

After this happened I remapped it to cmd+F, luckily the app had the ability to do that but honestly I consider it important enough that the OS should provide it. I know a lot of windows users point to AutoHotKey but it's a horrible janky feeling hack and requires you to write actual scripts.

100%

And it should be a global panel for all installed apps..

With a tab for each app-map, and the ability to export/import a settings file.

It is, minus the built-in import/export (but plists can be copied): https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2262/12....

In macOS at least you can remap any key as well as keyboard shortcut (both globally and per-app) from the built in OS keyboard preferences. The only thing it requires is that the thing you want to change has a "menu item" (so a named thing in the top menu bar in any of the submenus). Hotkey mapping works by simply mapping to any of the texts in those (sub) menus, however deep you want to go. The great thing about it is the developer of the app doesn't need to do anything to allows that, and it essentially only gets broken if an app goes out of its way to be as non-native as possible (i.e. if it doesn't even use the standard libraries that ship with the OS).

I know and love this feature and have used to to remap many things across my apps.

Just frustrates me other OSes don’t match this bar that I consider the bare minimum.

Windows has support to remap keys built in, there's just no UI for it oddly. I think it was added in 2000?

https://www.ghacks.net/2010/06/06/the-ultimate-guide-to-keyb...

I have a .reg file that I run on every new install to remap Caps-Lock to Ctrl

This is one thing I love about Wooting keyboards. The Wootility [0] lets you drag and drop keys around your layout to remap them, and save the mappings to the keyboard itself, so the keys will stay mapped even if you move it between systems.

[0] https://next.wooting.io/wootility

It’s a great feature. It doesn’t always work 100% stable though. Would love to see it put further into the OS somehow. Macos key / modifier remaps are much more stable than powertoys’.

Yeah, I've tried PowerToys a couple of times but always end up going to back to Autohotkey for this because it's just so much more consistent.

I tend to remap caps to ctrl, for instance. Sometimes this fails, meaning that suddenly, the keyboard is stuck in caps lock mode and can’t be returned to «lower caps mode». I don’t know if autohotkey can intercept caps lock?

Absolutely, that's actually what exactly what I use it for. The only time it can be a little wonky is when RDP'ing to remote servers.

  #SingleInstance force
  if not A_IsAdmin
   Run \*RunAs "%A_ScriptFullPath%" ;
  LControl::Capslock
  Capslock::Control

It still doesn’t support app-specific key remappings though (as opposed to app-specific keyboard shortcuts). This issue has been open since 2020, I’m not sure what they are waiting for: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6756

In the meantime I’ll stick with AutoHotkey.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com