Aug 9 2009

Remapping the keyboard on Windows 7

Category: zvolkov @ 10:57

I really like my Lenovo ThinkPad W500, and I bought it well before Hanselman bought his. The only real issue I have with it is its keyboard. Not the keys themselves (which are pretty nice for a laptop) but rather their location, specifically, the Home / End / Insert / Delete keypad. It's kind of hard to see at the picture but if you look carefully you'll see their rather awkward location at the right top corner of the keyboard.

The way I solved this issue is by using a great utility called Key Mapper. It maps keys by adding Registry entries - no need for yet another resident program in your system tray.

As I said in my analysis of my keyboard usage habits, I use Home / End a lot and I like my Delete key not far from my cursor keys. So I figured what I need is to map the Back and Forward keys (the ones above the cursor keys), to Home and End correspondingly. I also mapped my Right Control key to Delete. I may also map the Context Menu key (the one to the left of the Right Control) to Insert, but let's see if I really need that.

The only trick (and the reason for this post) is getting the mappings to work on Windows 7. As Key Mapper developer says on his blog, Windows 7 dropped support for per-user mappings. Thanks God we still have so called boot mappings which are essentially  per-machine, and Key Mapper does support them. Run Key Mapper as administrator, switch to the boot mappings view (Mappings \  Show \ Boot Mappings), then add your mappings normally and reboot your machine.

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Comments

1.
cowgaR cowgaR says:

its "awkward" location been with us since the begining of ages on "desktop keyboards" and the first notebooks until recently...

well... until we got used to the new "notebook keyboard layout" with navigation (home/end/pg up/down...) keys on the furthest right collumn of the keyboard which is 10 times better (at least for me).

Lenovo ("last man standing company of quality notebooks these days") should refresh its keyboard design, enlargering its DEL/ESC key on its T400s model (my fav) isn't going to help that, and remapping the key is usefull only for CAPS LOCK (which should be shot anyway Wink

btw excellent blog you have Andrei

P.S. now you only need to remap Fn/CTRL and you're ready to go with almost same layout as my XPS ;p

2.
zvolkov zvolkov says:

I tried remapping Fn but it just feels weird...

3.
Diana Baird Diana Baird says:

my geekiness is only a function of just how looooonggg I have been using this kind of gear (anyone better that 28 years experience out there) but new-fangled whizz bang still catches me out...  I have just gone from a lenovo/IBM (used to work for them) to a toshiba satellite running windows 7 and miss my internet back and forward keys.  Tried running re mapper as administrator,  but although the software looks good,  it had no actual effect...

Comments?

4.
zvolkov zvolkov says:

Diana, are you sure you add "boot mappings", not regular mappings? Once you add them you have to reboot Windows for them to take effect.

5.
trackback Yesterday's news says:

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