Saturday, September 8, 2012

Changing the Windows keyboard layout *permanently*

I involuntarily spend a lot of time in windows at the moment and one of the things that drives me nuts, is the inability to use different keyboard layouts permanently, globally without uninstalling the alternatives. Having to change it for every window, and redoing it after closing one just doesn't cut it. So i now use autohotkey  as an xmodmap and xbindkeys replacement and combine it with kbswitch. In order to get us altgr-intl (the parts that interest me) and make capslock another escape i switch the language to english and use the following autohotkey script:
CapsLock::Escape
>!y::SendInput ü
>!p::SendInput ö
>!q::SendInput ä
>!s::SendInput ß
+>!y::SendInput Ü
+>!p::SendInput Ö
+>!q::SendInput Ä

This appears to satisify my most basic needs for now. Now if there was something that would make this insanity of a vfs less messy i'd be almost content.

Why something hailing itself an international, multiuser OS doesn't have that is beyond me. I would love to force the responsible people to use amharric, japanese and russian in random succession and see if they volunteer to implement it afterwards.

<edit>I forgot to mention, that you should realy turn off the global hotkeys for switching the ime, or you'll likely hit alt shift sometimes and be confused why your layout changes by itself.</edit>

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