I need to swap Alt keys functionality in Windows 7. A big company needs that for old people that were writing on typewriters, which had diacritic characters key on the left side, but Win7 which they are working on now has right Alt for this purpose.
Two days of research brought me to a driver solution. I need source code for original Windows 7 drivers (two .sys files seem to be the keyboard drivers), and possibily to modify them in Windows DDK. Or I need to make an additional driver that would work with the default ones. As I can see, the solution would be in C or C++. But what way do I have to go to accomplish this? What steps should I take?
The limits are:
One system restart only for driver installation.
A simple way to swap Alt keys while working in Win7 (swap Alt keys by pressing them both).
No Win7 keyboard remapping which needs a restart.
Added later: I have everything I need, but not the code that will handle the swapping. For example, I've made a switch for right Shift and Enter, because there is only one scancode sent. But left Alt sends one and right Alt sends two scancodes:
VOID
KbFilter_ServiceCallback(
IN PDEVICE_OBJECT DeviceObject,
IN PKEYBOARD_INPUT_DATA InputDataStart,
IN PKEYBOARD_INPUT_DATA InputDataEnd,
IN OUT PULONG InputDataConsumed
)
/*++
Routine Description:
Called when there are keyboard packets to report to the Win32 subsystem.
You can do anything you like to the packets. For instance:
o Drop a packet altogether
o Mutate the contents of a packet
o Insert packets into the stream
Arguments:
DeviceObject - Context passed during the connect IOCTL
InputDataStart - First packet to be reported
InputDataEnd - One past the last packet to be reported. Total number of
packets is equal to InputDataEnd - InputDataStart
InputDataConsumed - Set to the total number of packets consumed by the RIT
(via the function pointer we replaced in the connect
IOCTL)
Return Value:
Status is returned.
--*/
{
PDEVICE_EXTENSION devExt;
WDFDEVICE hDevice;
hDevice = WdfWdmDeviceGetWdfDeviceHandle(DeviceObject);
devExt = FilterGetData(hDevice);
if (InputDataStart->MakeCode==0x1c)
InputDataStart->MakeCode=0x36;
else if (InputDataStart->MakeCode==0x36)
InputDataStart->MakeCode=0x1c;
else if (InputDataStart->MakeCode==0x9c)
InputDataStart->MakeCode=0xb6;
else if (InputDataStart->MakeCode==0xb6)
InputDataStart->MakeCode=0x9c;
(*(PSERVICE_CALLBACK_ROUTINE)(ULONG_PTR) devExt->UpperConnectData.ClassService)(
devExt->UpperConnectData.ClassDeviceObject,
InputDataStart,
InputDataEnd,
InputDataConsumed);
}
So I simply swap the scancodes of pressing and releasing both keys individually. Right Alt is sending two scancodes and I'm not sure if it does that by two calls of this function or makes two scancodes in the InputDataStart structure. I'll try to beep every Alt scancode but your help would be appreciated.
Solution:
if (InputDataStart->MakeCode==0x38 || InputDataStart->MakeCode==0xb8)
InputDataStart->Flags^=KEY_E0;
which swaps right-left Alt keys functionality.
Now I need to make the swapping configurable. For the best - by pressing both Alts.
When I type any key, normally, it is immediately echoed back to the std output i.e.my screen.
If I have to enter a password, that says that it will not echo back, I cannot see the keys that I type.
How does this work.
Does each key press go to the kernel immediately(without me pressing ENTER), and then the kernel decides to echo them or not?
Like , I press 'A', it goes to the kernel; kernel echoes it; I get it on my screen. Now I hit 'B'...same sequence again...; Now I have 'AB' on my screen (my command) and hit ENTER; My command goes to the kernel and is finally executed.
Is there any other explanation? What happens in the background during the key presses?
The terminal driver in the kernel can be put in several modes (there are actually many more flags than this, and these days "cbreak" is actually the opposite of a different flag, so this is simplified).
The "cbreak" mode means that the process that is attempting to read from the terminal will receive keyboard input as soon as it is available. When cbreak mode is off, the data is stored by the kernel in a buffer until enter is pressed, and certain keys like backspace are handled by the kernel (when you press backspace, it removes the character from the buffer and - if echo mode is on - writes "backspace-space-backspace" to the terminal to overwrite the character with a blank space).
Echo mode means that whenever the user presses a key, the kernel will immediately echo it back to the screen. When it is off, nothing will be echoed to the screen, and the program will need to write it to the terminal if it wants you to see it.
There are several typical situations:
In programs that do advanced input handling (like most shells, or something like a full screen program), cbreak is on and echo is off; the program will write the character to the terminal itself if it is not part of a special key escape sequence.
In most situations [the default with a simple program that reads stdin and writes stdout], echo is on and cbreak is off. When you type, it behaves as I described above, all of this is handled by the kernel until you hit enter and it sends it to the application. Input editing is limited to backspace [and ctrl-u, ctrl-w], trying to use the arrow keys will just put escape sequences like ^[[D in the input line.
When reading a password, echo is off and cbreak is off. Input works just like the default case, except the kernel does not copy input to the screen.
The program that is running tells the kernel what mode to have it in with the termios functions. You can use the stty command to do the same in a shell environment, but be aware that this may interfere with the shell's own input handling or with what programs you run expect the default state to be.
Your keyboard generates electrical signals that are eventually interpreted as keycodes that correspond to letters - 'A', 'B', function keys F1, F2 etc. This all happen in the keyboard driver that is handled by the kernel. That keyboard driver has a buffer to receive all the keypresses from the keyboard and sends that to the kernel that in turn direct them to processes that is currently having the focus. What to do with the sequence of keys are totally decided by the individual application, such as whether to display the keys or not.
echo program is part of coreutils. You can download its sources here. Look at src/echo.c it's quite small. You can see that echo uses fputc or putchar calls. Those calls deal with standard stream called stdout. The architecture of standard streams is quite complicated and it's beyond of this post. You can found it using for example google.
Currently I am working on a project which has following setup.
AVR micro-controller
IDE - AVR Studio
Operating system - FreeRTOS
For input I am using a keypad matrix of 4x3. I have already coded for 4x3 keypad to take inputs as numbers. But now I want to make it alpha-numeric. Like we see in our mobile phone keypads.
Example - Key 2 will be used to take input for 2,a,b,c. Single press key 2, we will get number 2, double press key 2 then we will get 'a', tripple press key 2 then we will get 'b' and fourtimes press key 2 then we will get 'd' on scree.
I hope all of you understood what I mean above. Can anybody give some code idea in C to implement this type of functionality?
You most likely just need to keep track of the system time of the last key press and compare it to the system time of the next key press. If the current key is the same key as the last press and the time between presses is small (say, under one second), replace the current input character with the next character in the list of characters for that key. If the time difference is more than one second, or if a different key was pressed, accept the current character and add a new character, starting at the first character in the list for the key.
see the issue is when you press 2(say) in xxx sec time later after 30 millisec if you check and find that 2 is pressed then there are two cases.
case1> the pressed key is new and is same as previous
case2> the pressed key is same as previous and it is pressed from xxx till now contineously.
Is it possible in any way to send the key "C-(" to Emacs over a VT100/xterm terminal (Mac OS X Terminal)? Is there an escape sequence that could be sent to achieve the equivalent?
I suspect the fundamental problem is that the concept of combining control with the character "(" (and other such characters that are produced using shift) does not exist.
Note: Using Cocoa Emacs is not an option. And the reason for needing "C-(" is that paredit.el uses it amongst other key combinations, and it would be preferable to not remap it (because it makes sense to have it on "C-(").
A VT100 terminal couldn't do that, because there is no ^( control character corresponding to (. However, xterm has the so-called "modifyOtherKeys" mode, which does allow to send unique keycodes for combinations like that.
To enable it, set the modifyOtherKeys resource, e.g. in ~/.Xdefaults:
XTerm*vt100.modifyOtherKeys: 1
With that, Ctrl+( will send the following keycode:
^[[27;6;40~
That's rather long though, so another format for keycodes like that was introduced, which can be enabled by setting the formatOtherKeys resource:
XTerm*vt100.formatOtherKeys: 1
With that, Ctrl+( sends:
^[[40;6u
In both of these keycodes, the 40 is the decimal ASCII code for (, and the 6 represents the Ctrl.
See man xterm and http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html for further details. No idea whether Terminal.app supports any of it.
I have a bad habit of using the cursor keys of my keyboard to navigate source code. It's something I've done for 15 years and this of course means that my navigating speed is limited by the speed of the keyboard. On both Vista and OS X (I dual boot a MacBook), I have my key repeat rate turned all the way up. But in Visual Studio, and other apps, the rate is still much slower than I would prefer.
How can I make the key repeat rate faster in Visual Studio and other text editors?
In Windows you can set this with a system call (SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETFILTERKEYS,...)).
I wrote a utility for myself: keyrate <delay> <repeat>.
Github repository.
Full source in case that link goes away:
#include <windows.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
BOOL parseDword(const char* in, DWORD* out)
{
char* end;
long result = strtol(in, &end, 10);
BOOL success = (errno == 0 && end != in);
if (success)
{
*out = result;
}
return success;
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
FILTERKEYS keys = { sizeof(FILTERKEYS) };
if (argc == 1)
{
puts ("No parameters given: disabling.");
}
else if (argc != 3)
{
puts ("Usage: keyrate <delay ms> <repeat ms>\nCall with no parameters to disable.");
return 0;
}
else if (parseDword(argv[1], &keys.iDelayMSec)
&& parseDword(argv[2], &keys.iRepeatMSec))
{
printf("Setting keyrate: delay: %d, rate: %d\n", (int) keys.iDelayMSec, (int) keys.iRepeatMSec);
keys.dwFlags = FKF_FILTERKEYSON|FKF_AVAILABLE;
}
if (!SystemParametersInfo (SPI_SETFILTERKEYS, 0, (LPVOID) &keys, 0))
{
fprintf (stderr, "System call failed.\nUnable to set keyrate.");
}
return 0;
}
On Mac OS X, open the Global Preferences plist
open ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
Then change the KeyRepeat field. Smaller numbers will speed up your cursor rate. The settings dialog will only set it to a minimum of 2, so if you go to 0 or 1, you'll get a faster cursor.
I had to reboot for this to take effect.
Many times I want to center a function in my window. Scrolling is the only way.
Also, Ctrl-left/right can still be slow in code where there are a lot of non-word characters.
I use keyboardking also. It has a couple of isssues for me though. One, it sometimes uses the default speed instead of the actual value I set. The other is sometimes it ignores the initial delay. I still find it very useful though. They said 4 years ago they would release the source in 6 months... :(
Ok, on the suggestion of someone that modified HCU\...\Keyboard Response, this works well for me.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\Keyboard Response]
"AutoRepeatDelay"="250"
"AutoRepeatRate"="13"
"BounceTime"="0"
"DelayBeforeAcceptance"="0"
"Flags"="59"
Windows standard AutoRepeat delay.
13 ms (77 char/sec) repeat rate.
flags turns on FilterKeys?
These values are read at login. Remember to log out and back in for this to take effect.
For Windows, open regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard. Change KeyboardSpeed to your liking.
I'm using KeyboardKing on my PC. It's freeware and it can increase the repeat rate up to 200 which is quite enough. I recommend to set the process priority to High for even smoother moves and less "repeat locks" which happen sometime and are very annoying. With high priority, it works perfectly.
No one understands why we navigate by arrows. It's funny.
Visual Assist has an option to double your effective key movements in Visual Studio which I use all the time.
As mentioned by the hyperlogic, on Mac OS X, internally, there are two parameters dealing with the keyboard speed: KeyRepeat and InitialKeyRepeat. In the System Preferences they are mapped to the Key Repeat Rate and the Delay Until Repeat sliders. The slider ranges and the associated internal parameter values (in parenthesis) are show below. They seem to be multipliers of the 15 ms keyboard sampling interval.
Key Repeat Rate (KeyRepeat) Delay Until Repeat (InitialKeyRepeat)
|--------------------------------| |----------------------|-----------------|
slow (120) fast (2) off (30000) long (120) short (25)
0.5 char/s 33 char/s
Fortunately, these parameters can be set beyond the predefined limits directly in the ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist file. I found the following values most convenient for myself:
KeyRepeat = 1 --> 1/(1*15 ms) = 66.7 char/s
InitialKeyRepeat = 15 --> 15*15 ms = 225 ms
Note that in the latest Mac OS X revisions the sliders are named slightly differently.
I do like to work on the keyboard alone. Why? Because when you use the mouse you have to grab it. A time loss.
On the other hand sometimes it seems that every application has its own keyboard type-rates built in. Not to speak from BIOS-properties or OS-settings. So I gathered shortkeys which can be pretty fast (i.e. you are faster typing Ctrl + right(arrow)-right-right than keeping your finger on the right(arrow) key :).
Here are some keyboard shortcuts I find most valuable (it works on Windows; I am not sure about OS X):
ctrl-right: Go to the end of the previous/the next word (stated before)
ctrl-left: Go to the beginning of the previous/the word before (stated before)
ctrl-up: Go to the beginning of this paragraph
(or to the next paragraph over this)
ctrl-down: Go to the end of this paragraph
(or to the next paragraph after this)
ctrl-pos1: Go to the beginning of the file
ctrl-end: Go to the end of the file
All these may be combined with the shift-key, so that the text is selected while doing so. Now let's go for more weird stuff:
alt-esc: Get the actual application into the background
ctrl-esc: This is like pressing the "start-button" in Windows: You can
navigate with arrow keys or shortcuts to start programs from here
ctrl-l: While using Firefox this accesses the URL-entry-field to simply
type URLs (does not work on Stack Overflow :)
ctrl-tab,
ctrl-pageup
ctrl-pagedwn Navigate through tabs (even in your development environment)
So these are the most used shortcuts I need while programming.
For OS X, the kernel extension KeyRemap4MacBook will allow you to fine tune all sorts of keyboard parameters, among which the key repeat rate (I set mine to 15 ms, and it works nice).
I don't know how to accelerate beyond the limit, but I know how to skip further in a single press. My knowledge is only in Windows, as I have no Mac to do this in. Ctrl + Arrow skips a word, and depending on the editor it may just skip to the next section of whitespace. You can also use Ctrl + Shift + Arrow to select a word in any direction.
Seems that you can't do this easily on Windows 7.
When you press and hold the button, the speed is controlled by Windows registry key : HCU->Control Panel->Keyboard->Keyboard Delay.
By setting this param to 0 you get maximum repeat rate. The drama is that you can't go below 0 if the repeat speed is still slow for you. 0-delay means that repeat delay is 250ms. But, 250ms delay is still SLOW as hell. See this : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978658.aspx
You still can go to Accesibility, but you should know that those options are to help disabled people to use their keyboard, not give help for fast-typing geeks. They WON'T help. Use Linux, they tell you.
I bieleve the solution for Windows lies in hardware control. Look for special drivers for your keyboards or try to tweak existing ones.
Although the question is several years old, I still come across the same issue from time to time in several different developer sites. So I thought I may contribute an alternative solution, which I use for my everyday-developer-work (since the Windows registry settings never worked for me).
The following is my small Autorepeat-Script (~ 125 lines), which can be run via AutoHotkey_L (the downside is, it only runs under Windows, at least Vista, 7, 8.1):
; ====================================================================
; DeveloperTools - Autorepeat Key Script
;
; This script provides a mechanism to do key-autorepeat way faster
; than the Windows OS would allow. There are some registry settings
; in Windows to tweak the key-repeat-rate, but according to widely
; spread user feedback, the registry-solution does not work on all
; systems.
;
; See the "Hotkeys" section below. Currently (Version 1.0), there
; are only the arrow keys mapped for faster autorepeat (including
; the control and shift modifiers). Feel free to add your own
; hotkeys.
;
; You need AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com) to run this script.
; Tested compatibility: AutoHotkey_L, Version v1.1.08.01
;
; (AutoHotkey Copyright © 2004 - 2013 Chris Mallet and
; others - not me!)
;
; #author Timo Rumland <timo.rumland ${at} gmail.com>, 2014-01-05
; #version 1.0
; #updated 2014-01-05
; #license The MIT License (MIT)
; (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php)
; ====================================================================
; ================
; Script Settings
; ================
#NoEnv
#SingleInstance force
SendMode Input
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%
; Instantiate the DeveloperTools defined below the hotkey definitions
developerTools := new DeveloperTools()
; ========
; Hotkeys
; ========
; -------------------
; AutoRepeat Hotkeys
; -------------------
~$UP::
~$DOWN::
~$LEFT::
~$RIGHT::
DeveloperTools.startAutorepeatKeyTimer( "" )
return
~$+UP::
~$+DOWN::
~$+LEFT::
~$+RIGHT::
DeveloperTools.startAutorepeatKeyTimer( "+" )
return
~$^UP::
~$^DOWN::
~$^LEFT::
~$^RIGHT::
DeveloperTools.startAutorepeatKeyTimer( "^" )
return
; -------------------------------------------------------
; Jump label used by the hotkeys above. This is how
; AutoHotkey provides "threads" or thread-like behavior.
; -------------------------------------------------------
DeveloperTools_AutoRepeatKey:
SetTimer , , Off
DeveloperTools.startAutorepeatKey()
return
; ========
; Classes
; ========
class DeveloperTools
{
; Configurable by user
autoRepeatDelayMs := 180
autoRepeatRateMs := 40
; Used internally by the script
repeatKey := ""
repeatSendString := ""
keyModifierBaseLength := 2
; -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Starts the autorepeat of the current captured hotkey (A_ThisHotKey). The given
; 'keyModifierString' is used for parsing the real key (without hotkey modifiers
; like "~" or "$").
; -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
startAutorepeatKeyTimer( keyModifierString )
{
keyModifierLength := this.keyModifierBaseLength + StrLen( keyModifierString )
this.repeatKey := SubStr( A_ThisHotkey, keyModifierLength + 1 )
this.repeatSendString := keyModifierString . "{" . this.repeatKey . "}"
SetTimer DeveloperTools_AutoRepeatKey, % this.autoRepeatDelayMs
}
; ---------------------------------------------------------------------
; Starts the loop which repeats the key, resulting in a much faster
; autorepeat rate than Windows provides. Internally used by the script
; ---------------------------------------------------------------------
startAutorepeatKey()
{
while ( GetKeyState( this.repeatKey, "P" ) )
{
Send % this.repeatSendString
Sleep this.autoRepeatRateMs
}
}
}
Save the code above in a text file (UTF-8), for example named "AutorepeatScript.ahk"
Install AutoHotkey_L
Double click on "AutorepeatScript.ahk" to enjoy much fast arrow-keys (or put the file into your autostart-folder)
(You can adjust the repeat delay and rate in the script, see '; Configurable by user').
Hope this helps!
On Mac, it's option-arrow to skip a word and ⌥+Shift+Arrow to select. ⌘+Arrow skips to the end or beginning of a line or the end or beginning of a document. There are also the page up, page down, home and end keys ;) Holding shift selects with those too.
Well, it might be obvious, but:
For horizontal navigation, Home (line start), End (line end), Ctrl-Left (word left), Ctrl-Right (word right) work in all editors I know
For vertical navigation, Page Up, Page Down, Ctrl-Home (text start), Ctrl-End (text end) do too
Also (on a side note), I would like to force my Backspace and Delete keys to non-repeat, so that the only way to delete (or replace) text would be to first mark it, then delete it (or type the replacement text).
Don't navigate character-by-character.
In Vim (see ViEmu for Visual Studio):
bw -- prev/next word
() -- prev/next sentence (full stop-delimited text)
{} -- prev/next paragraph (blank-line delimited sections of text)
/? -- move the cursor to the prev/next occurence the text found (w/ set incsearch)
Moreover, each of the movements takes a number as prefix that lets you specify how many times to repeat the command, e.g.:
20j -- jump 20 lines down
3} -- three paragraphs down
4w -- move 4 words forward
40G -- move to (absolute) line number 40
There are most likely equivalent ways to navigate through text in your editor. If not, you should consider switching to a better one.