How To Remap Your Keyboard

The standard Windows keyboard layout hasn’t changed much in the past few decades, and there’s a chance you don’t use every key on your keyboard.

- Whitson Gordon

If you think the Caps Lock key would better serve you with a different function or wish you could open up Windows’ Task Manager with one keystroke, you can remap unused keys.

REMAP KEYS WITH SHARPKEYS

If you merely want to remap one key to another, SharpKeys is a simple, open source program that can do so using the Windows registry. For example, I use SharpKeys to make my Alt key act as the Ctrl key and my Caps Lock act as the Windows key.

Since SharpKeys writes this information directly to the Windows registry, it’s the best option for these kinds of one-to-one key remappings—you don’t have to rely on some other software as a middleman, and you’ll run into the fewest compatibility issues, since Windows itself is interpreting the keystrokes as you’ve told it to.

Download the program (I recommend the portable ZIP version, which doesn’t require installation), and start it up. To remap a key, click the Add button and choose your keys from the two columns. The left column denotes the key you’ll press (for example, the Caps Lock key) and the right column denotes the action that key will take (for example, acting as the Windows key). You can also press the Type Key button and press a key on your keyboard if you have trouble hunting it down in the list.