Sharp Keys

You’re typing away merrily, and being the consummate typist you are, you don’t look at the keys-or the screen. (After all, did Jimi Hendrix look at his fingers as he played “Little Bird?”) But when you do glance at the screen, you see that two paragraphs ago, your left hand’s little finger slipped AND STRUCK THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY MISTAKE. NOW YOUR WELL REASONED AND CLEVER MEMO ASKING FOR A RAISE LOOKS AS IF IT WAS WRITTEN BY BANK ROBBERS ORDERING TELLERS TO HAND OVER THE MONEY.

Such accidents are eliminated with SharpKeys, a free, little one-trick pony as obscure as Sasquatch. SharpKeys allows you to move your keys around to suit your idea of how a keyboard should be laid out. For example, I’ve banished my Caps Lock key to the Scroll Lock key, which had its hey-day when Lotus 1-2-3 was hot. My Caps Lock now functions as another Delete key. The arrangement lets me select files by mousing with my right hand and zapping them with my left.

You can come up with your own scheme using any of the keys, including those that most macro programs won’t change. Well, almost any key. Some boards with keys devoted to gaming may elude SharpKeys, but it does work with multimedia keys. And it does all this by creating some Registry entries rather than lurking in the background all the time soaking up memory.

–Ron White