Having some trouble remapping "www home" to "alt"

[kenquad]

Hi all:

I don't like the location of the www home key on my new Kinesis Freestyle, so I'm trying to make it an extra Alt key instead.  I tried doing this with Keytweak, then with Sharpkeys (which do exactly the same thing as far as I know, editing the registry).  Both worked, sort of.  The key now actuates Alt as it should - but if a web browser window is open at the time, it also opens the homepage.  I'm on Windows 7.

Any ideas?

[Minskleip]

You only want the browser to raise to foreground if it's already running? Autohotkey can do that.

[kenquad]

You only want the browser to raise to foreground if it's already running? Autohotkey can do that.

Actually I don't want a www home key at all.  I want it to be an Alt key instead.  The problem is that the browser, if it's open and active, insists on treating it as www home as well as Alt.

[Minskleip]

Haha I see. You can still try Autohotkey, but maybe Windows treat those extra scancodes differently.

[False_Dmitry_II]

You may have to use autohotkey anyway.

I'm not too keen on having extra software running in the background, but it may well be you can't fix that one through the registry. You could try building an entirely new keyboard map (instead of using the standard US one or whatever) that does that.

[kenquad]

This isn't going well...

First off, I deleted all the customizations from Sharpkeys and uninstalled it.  After restarting the computer, www home is behaving exactly as it did before - with both the functions of Alt and itself.  I reinstalled both Keytweak and Sharpkeys, but no customizations are showing up in either of those programs.

Switching vectors, I tried AutoHotKey.  I used its keylogging script to determine how the browser key register with the program, and got a rude surprise: They don't.  As far as AHK is concerned, the back, forward, search, and www home keys on the Kinesis Freestyle might as well not exist.

So at this point, I'm kinda scratching my head as to why my original remapping won't go away, and AHK can't see the special browser keys.

The last option would be to send the board back to Kinesis for custom firmware, but that's ten bucks plus shipping both ways.

[False_Dmitry_II]

Must be one of those 'install drivers to use' keys that I always ignore and have no idea what they do. Which is generally nothing without those drivers.

Could always do something to the switch so that it cannot be pressed anymore.

[kenquad]

Well, I did not install any drivers for the Freestyle.  To my knowledge, there aren't any.

[nrd]

Switching vectors, I tried AutoHotKey.  I used its keylogging script to determine how the browser key register with the program, and got a rude surprise: They don't.  As far as AHK is concerned, the back, forward, search, and www home keys on the Kinesis Freestyle might as well not exist.

Might just be a problem with the keylogging script you used. Try a simple script like

Code: [Select]

Browser_Home::MsgBox, "Hi, this is the www home key!"to check if the keystrokes really don't register (which I can't imagine, since Multimedia/Internet function keys are pretty standard stuff for AHK). Considering you've already experimented with the Home key and tried remapping it, you might want to check all the other Internet keys too to make sure it's not just an issue with your failed remapping attempt.
The keys should be: Browser_Home, Browser_Back, Browser_Forward and Browser_Search respectively.

As far as your trouble with the altered scancode map goes, did you try setting a new keyboard layout as default (then deleting your old default layout from the list, rebooting, then setting your usual layout as default again) or cleaning the registry manually?

[kenquad]

Okay, it's fixed, sort of.

Considering you've already experimented with the Home key and tried remapping it, you might want to check all the other Internet keys too to make sure it's not just an issue with your failed remapping attempt.
The keys should be: Browser_Home, Browser_Back, Browser_Forward and Browser_Search respectively.

I had actually done that already, only I didn't know what I was looking at when I analyzed the results.

It turns out that the browser control keys on the Freestyle do not send the standard scancodes associated with those keys.  Instead, they send Alt combinations: Alt-Home for www home, Alt-LeftArrow for Back, Alt-RightArrow for Forward, and WindowsKey-F for Search.  The unfortunate coincidence here is that this allows any of these keys to work much like Alt itself, i.e. Back-Tab will do the same thing as Alt-Tab.  It took me way too long to figure this out, but when I did, everything became clear.  In reality, my modifications using Keytweak and Sharpkeys never made the slightest difference to anything!  I only thought they did because I didn't try subbing Home for Alt until I had made them.  So I labored long under the misimpression that my "modifications" were "not going away," when in reality there were no modifications; what I described is how it works out of the box.

Armed with this knowledge, I placed the following in an AHK script:

Code: [Select]

!Home::Alt
; Maps Alt-Home to Alt

Now this does not make Home work 100% like an Alt key, probably because the system sees a double-press of the Alt key.  But it does suppress the www home key function and allow Alt-Tab and other held-down combinations to work, which is all I care about.

Thanks for helping me get this sorted.

[False_Dmitry_II]

I guess you should have checked aquakeytest to see what was being sent.

I think that script would also stop you from doing that yourself if you wanted to. Not that I use any of those things.

[nrd]

Glad you got it sorted :smile:

Out of curiosity, in what way does your "new" Home key not work like the regular Alt key?

[kenquad]

Out of curiosity, in what way does your "new" Home key not work like the regular Alt key?

A normal Alt key will activate the top menu of an application so you can use keyboard shortcuts to select menu items.  My new Alt key won't do that; it only works with combinations where you hold down the Alt key and do something, like Alt-Tab.

[kenquad]

Just use Aquakeytest and keep an eye bottom left.  Gotta be a scancode there somewhere.

Thanks for putting me onto Aqua; it's a cool utility.  However, it returns exactly the same thing AHK showed.  The scancodes coming from the board are simply Alt combinations.  Since there are dedicated scancodes for browser functions in the standard map, I can't understand why Kinesis chose to use macro'd Alt combinations instead, but that's apparently what they did.

[False_Dmitry_II]

Yeah, but you seemed to have to know what you were looking for before you found it in that. It's much better to blindly look at things in aqua.

[kenquad]

Yup, Aqua is much more foolproof :smile:

[nrd]

A normal Alt key will activate the top menu of an application so you can use keyboard shortcuts to select menu items.  My new Alt key won't do that; it only works with combinations where you hold down the Alt key and do something, like Alt-Tab.

Ah, yeah, that's probably a common problem when trying to remap a key to itself (or Alt+x to plain Alt). I've toyed around with it for a bit last night, but couldn't come up with a real solution. Didn't find anything useful on Google either (then again it's hard to search for "remap alt to alt" or the like). Since the keyboard doesn't use the real scancodes you probably have to live with that... But as long as your regular Alt key still works fine and you don't need your new Alt to toggle menus, it shouldn't be a big deal.

If I happen to stumble upon a solution (because I'm dealing with a similar issue myself), I'll post it here, just for completness' sake :smile: