The Anonymous Widower

The Definitive Stroke-Friendly Keyboard Driver Specification

I have had further thoughts on this and one of my late son’s best friends has sent me an e-mail, describing the programming techniques that need to be employed.  Unfortunately, his company don’t have the time to write the driver.

The objective is to write a driver similar to the one that comes with the Microsoft Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000, which allows certain keystrokes to be disabled. The driver version is 6.0.6002.18005.  When you install this driver it gives more details about the files involved.

But the ability to disable keystrokes needs to be extended.

• Microsoft allows you to disable a lot of keys, but I want to disable, such as control, Shift, Windows and Alt. 
• In fact, I would like to be able to disable both left and right control and shift keys independently, as I sometimes find it easier to give up on my left hand completely and say do Shift-O, by spanning my right hand.
• I would also like to allow certain pairs of keys, like Control-C and Control-V, as I use them extensively to cut and paste.
• I think the Microsoft driver allows various profile of keystrokes to be setup, so that should be retained, so that if two users use the same machine, their optimum keystroke settings can be used.

There is an alternative approach to this driver, that I am investigating.  The Microsoft Driver must store the list of key reassignments in the Registry.  If I could find out how they do this, then I could write a Visual Basic 6 program to adjust that instead.  That would in some ways be my preferred solution.

After all, there isn’t anything that a good Visual Basic 6 programmer can’t do! Microsoft know this and still use it to get themselves out of big holes.  Otherwise, why would they have spent millions of dollars making sure that all Visual Basic 6 programs work on Vista and Windows 7? Not for charity for old farts like me!

I have made a bit of progress in this approach in that I have found where the Registry stores the settings. It is detailed on this web site.

July 29, 2010 - Posted by AnonW | Computing | Keyboard, Microsoft, Software, Visual Basic 6