wow autohotkey wow

so I got a new netbook recently, because my old one (acer aspire one) up and died all of a sudden. the new one is a hp mini 210 hd. as far as netbooks go, it’s pretty rad. it has a high resolution screen, which is great until I realized I couldn’t read anything. so I set the computer to high DPI. How ludicrous is that? a netbook running with high dpi.

anyway, the main thing I find wrong with it is some puzzling choices with the keyboard. there are no dedicated page up, page down, home, and end buttons. Instead, to do that, you have to hit the dreaded Fn key plus up, down, left, or right. that would be fine, I guess, if there were an Fn key on both the left and the right. as it is, it’s only on the left, so to do a page down, I have to use both hands. annoying.

Another weird choice is making the key for “printscreen” the same as the key for “insert”, but making it so that the primary function is printscreen and the secondary (Fn) function is insert. I guess I can kind of understand that. I am probably one of the minority who sometimes uses ctrl+insert and shift+insert for copy and paste, respectively.

I found a program called sharpkeys that allows for some limited remapping of keys, apparently using some built-in windows feature having to do with scancodes. I say limited because a big limitation is the inability to map a combination of keys to a single other keystroke. in particular, I am interested in making right-control + up/down do my page up/down for me.

After some searching, I found a program called autohotkey, which does all this and way more. I’m using just the basics right now, but it can do all kinds of stuff, like run arbitrary programs upon receiving a keystroke, scan windows that are open on the system, append to files, and tons of other things.

here’s my script that I’m using for it right now. it’s pretty simple and slick. I no longer need to use sharpkeys either.

AppsKey & Down:: Send {WheelDown}
AppsKey & Up:: Send {WheelUp}

RCtrl & Down:: Send {PgDn}
RCtrl & Up:: Send {PgUp}
RCtrl & Left:: Send {Home}
RCtrl & Right:: Send {End}

PrintScreen::Ins
Ins::PrintScreen