CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macoskeyboardshortcutremap
Phil Williams
Phil Williams

Reputation: 81

Remapping shortcut buttons on the kinesis freestyle 2

This is a niche problem, but making a reference if it helps anyone!

If you have a keyboard with built in shortcut keys and you want to reprogram them, what do you do? I had a kinesis freestyle 2 keyboard (mac and PC versions) that had two rows of built in shortcut keys mapped to a mac, but I wanted to use it on a PC (no way to return for PC dedicated version and printed keys have different shortcuts).

If you go to kinesis' website - a bit user hostile customer service in my experience - they will tell you there is no way to remap the existing buttons... and then they'll happily link you to buying a new $200 keyboard, their "Pro" model, if you want remappable buttons.

Of course there is an easy fix. While there are multiple approaches, I turned to a kind soul with a free utility they've released to make the world a bit better. The utility for Windows is called "SharpKeys" by RandyRants.com and on a Mac, you have a system setting you can change. Here is a good write up on that by Matt Klein at "howtogeek"

After remapping the control and command keys and purposefully assigning the web back and forward buttons, I then had a useful keyboard... no thanks to Kinesis and their upsell tactic leaving their customers (who paid a premium for their ergonomic keyboard) in the dark with an easy solution in reach..

Upvotes: 8

Views: 1531

Answers (2)

Devon Apple
Devon Apple

Reputation: 1

I was able to "wake up" those hotkeys on the left side of the PC-issue Kinesis Freestyle 2 keyboard using the "Keyboard Shortcuts" feature on the Mac:

  1. Open System Settings > Keyboard.
  2. Select the Keyboard Shortcuts button to open a new dialog box.
  3. Select the App Shortcuts link to open a new dialog box.
  4. Add a new shortcut by selecting the "+" button.
  5. Select an application from the Application dropdown menu, or leave it at the default value "All Applications."
  6. Type the name of the command in the Menu title field. Examples include Delete, Copy, Paste, Undo. Note: you'll want to input multiple examples of the Undo command, as some applications will have separate commands for Undo Paste, Undo Cut, Undo Delete, etc. I had no problems mapping multiple versions of the Undo command to the same hotkey, and using the hotkey in Chrome.
  7. Select the Keyboard shortcut field.
  8. Press the hotkey that you want to map to the command.
  9. The field will show the key combination that the hotkey returns.
  10. Select the Done button.

Upvotes: 0

msa
msa

Reputation: 944

First of all, thanks for sharing. This helped me at least partially.

Unfortunately, this does not work for a lot of keys I wanted to remap. For example almost all of the keys in the two leftmost columns. The problem is that they actually send a shortcut (like Alt+Home).

For some cases, I now use the Keyboard Manager from Microsoft PowerToys. The mappings there don't require a restart to take effect. PowerToys has to be running in the background though, but I run it for other purposes anyway.

However the problem with the shortcut remains the same with PowerToys. At least I could remap the shortcut Alt+Home in general but not that specific key of the Freestyle2, since it doesn't send a separate scan code.

Upvotes: 1

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