Remapping shortcut buttons on the kinesis freestyle 2
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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..

Nonbelligerent answered 26/8, 2021 at 18:26 Comment(0)
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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.

Damning answered 30/7, 2024 at 14:2 Comment(0)

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