TradeKeys

Sometimes the keys on your keyboard just aren't in the right place. Many of you who are familiar with the original 84-key IBM PC keyboard layout have it ingrained in your muscle memory that the Ctrl key is right next to the A key.

This drives you nuts on most newer 102-key keyboard, on which the positions of the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys are reversed. You find yourselves toggling CapsLock on and off instead of typing a Ctrl Key combination. Perhaps you'd like to have your keyboard laid out more like a typewriter, with CapsLock at the bottom, Shift above, and Ctrl above that. You might even want to disable that pesky left Windows key, because you keep hitting it by mistake when you want the left Alt key.

TradeKeys makes all that possible; you can remap your keyboard almost any way you want. Under Windows 95, 98, and Me, you can change, swap, or disable any of the standard keys (those that existed on the original 84-key keyboard layout). Under Windows 2000 and XP, you can also remap extended keys such as the Right Ctrl and Right Alt keys, the Windows Logo key, and the navigation cluster. You can save your mappings to a file for later reloading. This lets different users on a system switch quickly between different mappings. TradeKeys 2 is an update of our earlier keyboard mapping utility, ZDKeyMap. TradeKeys 2 was written by Gregory A. Wolking, and first appeared in PC Magazine January 14, 2003 (v22n01). Source code is included.