Swapping Key Assignments in Vista

If you are an old-timer like me, you remember when the Control key an every keyboard was next to the "a" key, where God intended it to be. I'd like to find whoever had the brilliant idea of moving it to the bottom of the keyboard and putting the Caps Lock key in its place and force him or her to spend a week or two managing the cursor position with the old Wordstar Control commands.

Who Moved My Control Key?

Today, even moderately literate computer users know that they can cut and paste text with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Sadly, they have to risk a sprained wrist to do it with any speed at all. I imagine that the original intent of moving the Control key was, in part, to force us old farts to start using the mouse. I have nothing against using a mouse to control the cursor and, sometimes, it's downright useful, but sometimes I can do what I need to do in a lot less time using the Control-key combinations (they're still there in Windows and in a lot of word processors and code editors). PhpEd, my code editor of choice, has the full complement of the old Control shortcuts and many more (even the original, astoundingly useful, Ctrl-Q/Ctrl-K combos for setting and jumping to multiple bookmarks). Trying to use them with the Control key in the wrong place is sheer torture.

If you're still using the Edit menu for cutting and pasting, make the swap documented here, learn these three shortcuts, and save yourself a ton of time:

  • Ctrl-C - Copy text to the clipboard
  • Ctrl-X - Cut text to the clipboard
  • Ctrl-V - Paste text to the cursor location

Even if you don't want to put the Control key back where it belongs, you might still want to at least disable the Caps Lock key so that you don't accidentally end up shouting at people in e-mails and user groups.

How Can I Move it Back?

I learned how to manually change the scan codes in the registry in Windows XP to put the Control key back where it belongs. I think you could do the same thing in Windows Vista with regedit, but there's a much easier way. Just double-clicking on a .reg file will do it for you (if you can find the right file). The zip file below will let you change the keyboard in a number of ways. Sadly, I've lost the author's name. If you know it, let me know and I'll give credit here.

Click on the filename to download: KeboardMappings.zip

Download this file to your machine and unzip it. The files are sensibly named and do just what they say. You can look at them in Notepad or Wordpad to see that they do nothing but change the keyboard scancodes. If you're nervous, you can set a System Restore Point before running them. Just double-click on the one you want, tell Vista to relax, re-boot, and you're in business.

Contents of KeyboardMappings.zip:

  • ChangeCapsToControl.reg
  • ChangeCapsToShift.reg
  • DisableKeyboardRemap.reg
  • KillCapsLock.reg
  • SwitchCapsToScrollLock.reg

Update: Because Logitech seems to change the layout of their keyboards every few weeks (the one I have doesn't even match the picture on its own box), I was forced to search out a way to remap other keys than the ones listed above. I found a great new utility called KeyTweak with a full, easy-to-use interface that lets you remap any key to any other key. I've not only remapped the "Caps Lock" key to "Ctrl", but now have the poorly placed and useless "Insert" key remapped to "Home" and the never-used "Print Screen" key remapped to "My Computer". I also remapped "Scroll Lock" to "email" — highly recommended.

 

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  —  Bob Ray