For a while now, I've had a slightly frustrating problem with Windows key mappings. This week it became irritating, so I finally decided to look into a fix… or, at the very least, a workaround.<\/p>\n
No Rights<\/b><\/p>\n
It started with my work laptop. All the keys on it worked normally; I could select text by holding down either of the shift keys and pressing an arrow key. I could open a Remote Desktop connection to my PC at home and the keys still worked normally.<\/p>\n
But there was just one<\/i> stubborn Windows server in the lab that, over Remote Desktop, refused to listen to the right shift key. It's as if the right shift key did not exist.<\/p>\n
It agreed that the left shift key definitely exists; of course, learning to type with a key on the other side of the keyboard, with a different hand, would be to undo over a decade of muscle memory.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, I didn't have to use that lab server terribly often, and usually not for very long. So I would just get on with it.<\/p>\n
Argh<\/b><\/p>\n
At home I use a brilliant piece of software called Synergy<\/a> to mate my work laptop to my personal desktop machine; it's essentially a KVM switch<\/a> implemented in software, and without the 'M'.<\/p>\n I have a mouse and keyboard connected to my PC as usual, and when I take the mouse to the right-hand edge of my PC's screen, it jumps to the laptop screen and keyboard control goes with it. If I then take the mouse to the left-hand edge of my laptop screen, control jumps back to my PC. It's a brilliant way to fake a two-desktop solution across computers connected only by a LAN. Aside from some unreliable clipboard synchronisation, I've not had a problem with it.<\/p>\n Anyway, after swapping out my desktop PC and settling down with a new installation of Windows 7, I noticed that the keyboard mapping over Synergy was no longer behaving. When passing input through to my laptop, I could type capitals with either the left or the right shift key, but attempting to select text with the right shift key was a non-starter.<\/p>\n I failed to find any specific documentation on the issue and got increasingly fed up.<\/p>\n The work-around<\/b><\/p>\n Content at this point to work-around the issue in lieu of truly solving it, I turned to one of the many<\/a> good keyboard re-mapping tools out there on the web: KeyTweak<\/a> allowed me to trick my computer into thinking that Right Shift is actually Left Shift, which — after forcing a reboot on me — finally saw the end of this debacle.<\/p>\n If you run Windows Vista or Windows 7 and want to re-map your keyboard, be sure to get KeyTweak v2.3.0; many of the typical freeware download sites provide v2.2.0 and there doesn't appear to be a centralised homepage for the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a while now, I've had a slightly frustrating problem with Windows key mappings. This week it became irritating, so I finally decided to look into a fix… or, at the very least, a workaround.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}