Making a better keyboard

2007.05.01 — Business | Language | Computers | by Roland Grant

Way back in 2005, I wrote about my lifelong frustration with computer keyboard layouts. The hateful tilde, reverse apostrophe, filthy backslash, and strange and alien pipe are all horrible remnants of another time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and typed clumsy snail mail to send to each other. I tried a few keyboard remapper tools, but they were either unreliable or cost more than I wanted to pay (approximately nothing). Fortunately, I eventually found that Microsoft provides just such a tool, that it's reliable, and easy to use—for a Microsoft workaround product.

That M-dash I just typed was produced by simply pressing the reverse apostrophe key, which I have remapped to the M-dash. The tilde has been remapped to be a cent sign (¢), and my curly brackets are now curly quotes (“like this”).

After installing Keyboard Layout Creator, you just run it (MSKLC.exe) and start modifying the keyboard layout. When you click on a green key, you can reassign it whatever symbol you like. You may need to use Microsoft Word's Insert > Symbol... feature to get the character you want to add.

When you've finished creating the layout of your dreams, you save the file and then export a set of DLL files.

Right-click and save the Tysto keyboard map file. Modify it and export your own DLL files.

Then you launch Setup.exe to install the DLLs and start using the keyboard setup. You can even have multiple setups installed at one time and switch between them with the Microsoft language toolbar in the Windows Taskbar.

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