Keyboard Remapping


A while ago, there were several comments in Archive about remapping the keyboard to generate different codes. I was surprised that the emphasis was on making the Risc PC keyboard behave like an Archimedes one, as my problem at that time was converting between a PC at work and my Risc PC at home. I was forever getting confused by the little group of six keys above the arrow keys: why couldn't they do what they said? "Delete" should delete the character on the right of the cursor, "End" should go to the end of the line, and so on. Converting between Windows and RISC OS has never caused me any serious problems, but the keyboards are a completely different matter! It particularly infuriated me when using the PC Card, as the same key on the same keyboard attached to the same machine normally does completely different things!

At this point, I started combing the PD libraries for modules that would do this. I found one on Arcade BBS that almost did the job, but it had a flaw that caused me to abandon it. Then I found a small module called KeyMod in the Acorn library on CompuServe. It's written by Tony van der Hoff, and it does exactly what I want. To quote from the ReadMe file:

"Now that the Risc-PC has an IBM style keyboard, it makes sense that the DEL, HOME and END keys behave in a similar way to the PC. This relieves much confusion for those of us who use both PCs and Arcs. (This must be the only area where the PC has something better than the Arc)."

The only time I've found this not to work totally as expected is in Ovation and Ovation Pro, where the "Delete" key is used to remove links between frames. This doesn't work if KeyMod is loaded, but I have a couple of Obey files in my Ovation directory to turn it off when I need to delete frame links and back on when I've finished. You can download it from here, and I hope you find it as indispensable as I do. Tony has made it Shareware, and asks for a nominal financial contribution to ensure that he keeps you up to date with any new versions.


Connectivity - Support - Education - Programming - Acorn Reviews - EPOC32 Reviews - Acorn Links - Psion S5 Links - Home


Any comments? Please let me know.
The pages on this site are all © John Woodthorpe, and are my personal opinions. All trademarks are acknowledged.