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Keyboard reprogramming and VMs



Hi all,
My Avant Stellar has developed a couple of bad keys, and would need repair work to be fully functional again. Therefore, I bought a basic non-reprogrammable US keyboard with quite decent feel from Perixx (available e.g. at https://www.amazon.com/Perixx-PERIBOARD-106-Performance-wired-keyboard/dp/B00MPW3TBS). The keys are somewhat wider apart than in Avant, so it needs some getting used to.
The scenario: in Avant, I had Alt-Shift-Ctrl instead of Ctrl-Shift-CapsL 
and CapsL instead of Alt. These were reprogrammed in hardware. In 
addition, I had some other software fixes, like o and a umlauts for 
typing Finnish, and a couple of accents (^ and ") for French, the 
solution I use to do accented letters is Allchars (a Unix-type compose 
solution, I use RCtrl for the compose key). For the software 
reprogramming I use KbdEdit (http://www.kbdedit.com/). It works with W2K 
and later. And it works in virtual machines that have those OS's. In 
VirtuaBox, I have W2K, in vmWare, I have XP. So with Avant, I had Alt, 
Ctrl, CapsL handled by Avant hardware reprogramming and the rest by KbdEdit.
Now then, when the hardware reprogramming flew out of the window, I used 
KbdEdit "low-level programming" to do Alt, Ctrl, CapsL swaps. It works 
without a hitch in Win7, as well as virtual W2K and XP. In OTVDM XyWin 
(Win 3.1), this also worked. In vDosPlus NotaBene 3, I experienced some 
difficulty with CapsL, which was resolved by using ScrollLock for CapsL. 
My VirtualPC 2007 Win 3.1x proved to be more difficult: I have a quite 
capable "3-D Keyboard" (Fingertip Software) that handles my special 
layouts quite well, but does no do Alt, Ctrl, CapsL swaps that were 
handled by Avant. The same situation applies for Edward Mendelson's 
Win31DOSBox. To date, I have not found a solution that would fix Win 3.1 
VMs' Alt, Ctrl, CapsL swaps. Another hard to handle VM is my VirtualBox 
Centos 7 machine. While it is possible to rewrite Linux keyboard 
assignments, it is a lot of work and hardly worth the trouble. If Linux 
was my main OS, I would probably use the default Alt, Ctrl, CapsL 
assignments. By the way, I noticed that Win10 has an interesting 
Keyboard Manager power toy (see: 
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys). As I do not use Win10, I have 
not tried it.
If you need keyboard reprogramming, KbdEdit is the program to acquire. 
KbdEdit VM deployment in brief: First edit the host system keyboard: 
choose an installed layout that matches your desired keyboard the most 
(e.g. US), add the desired additional characters by dropping onto 
respective key states in the high-level editor tab, and fix Alt, Ctrl, 
CapsL assignments in the low-level tab. I kept the default "uses AtlGR" 
option (not doing so may wreak havoc with some autohotkey scripts). Save 
your keyboard layout with "Add to language bar list" selected. After 
this, go to "Regional settings" in the Control panel and select your new 
layout as the default, and restart the OS.
There are a couple of ways to transfer the layout to VMs. The best is to 
buy the KbdEdit Premium edition with which you can make installers for 
setting up your keyboard file in another computer or in a VM. In my 
case, I have an old version of KbdEdit (from 2008) that can be installed 
in VMs to support keyboard installation. In that case, one can export 
the layout as a .KBE file, and import it in the VM using KbdEdit. I am 
not sure if this is possible with newer versions. You may need a player 
version which does not cost much. There is also the possibility to make 
an .MSI package for deployment with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 
1.4 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339). 
Load your installed KbdEdit layout (Load existing keyboard, choose the 
name you gave the keyboard in KbdEdit) into MS Keyboard Layout Creator 
and create files from Project, Build DLL and Setup Package. You will get 
.MSIs for different platforms and a setup.exe. (N.B. MS KBLC does not 
show Alt, Ctrl, CapsL swaps, but you can check how the imported layout 
works from Project, Test keyboard). I have just used MS Keyboard Layout 
Creator as a passthrough.

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx

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