Death to Caps Lock: Addendum

Just a small update in my quest to kill off the caps lock key;

I've recently started a new job where everything is as locked down as it could be, meaning I'm restricted to a user-level account on Windows XP. After being so used to using caps lock as control I have now often been inadvertently replacing blocks of text with capital X or C while attempting to cut or copy.

So, after being frustrated enough to do something about it I tried my earlier recommended solution of using SharpKeys to perform the remapping, however I then discovered that SharpKeys currently only allows performing a global remapping meaning you need to be an administrator to perform it.

After a bit of googling I then thankfully discovered there is a way to perform the same remapping on a per-user basis, i.e. writing to HKEY_CURRENT_USER rather than HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

While it should be possible to add this functionality to SharpKeys now that the source code is available I however needed a quicker solution, so just manually updated the registry. The following is a .reg file that you can use to perform this local remapping; all this particular entry will do is simply remap caps lock to left control and nothing more:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout] 
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

Be sure to log out and log back in to have it applied!

In the interests of completeness the following is a .reg file that can revert the remapping changes by simply removing the key:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout] 
"Scancode Map"=-