Can I you reassign keyboard keys in Visual Studio 2008 or at least in Microsoft Windows?

Question

As I'm sure most of y'all are, I'm tired of having to press the SHIFT key every time I write a function call in C#, or for that matter any language.

So, is their any way to cause the "[" key on my keyboard to type a "(" on the screen, and also cause the "]" key to cause a ")" to be typed on the screen?

Answer 1

I use SharpKeys - my purpose is to turn off CAPSLOCK. Actually I just map it to CTRL. But it will remap any key to any other key. It remaps in all of Windows - I don't think you can get it to remap keys for a particular app.

EDIT: Clarification - SharpKeys is a utility that inserts keyboard mapping data into the Windows Registry. SharpKeys doesn't actively remap keys. It is a tool that you use to produce the key map, and put that key map into the registry so that key mapping occurs.

You could do the key mapping yourself with regedit. But it's easier with SharpKeys.

Answer 2

AutoHotKey is great software to do this.

Answer 3

If you install the Windows Resource Kit, there's a utility that's not mentioned, but is in the directory, called RemapKeys.

I use it to move CAPS-LOCK down to the right windows key (nice and out of the way), and cause the CAPS LOCK and INSERT keys to be SHIFT keys. Not sure if you can change shift behaviours using it.

Of course, there's a further problem with doing all this - don't expect any friends/colleagues to thank you when they take over typing on your keyboard and the key-caps lie to them about their behaviour.