Our assumption of unintended remapping led us into swampy territory. We spent about five hours that weekend, re-mapping her re-mapping.
First we downloaded KeyTweak, which is a great free tool for anyone actively intending to replace one keyboard character or function with another.
In its “half teach” mode, you can type in the key you want to replace, enter the desired key, choose “Apply”, restart your computer, and have your keyboard dance to your tune ... up to a point.
We quickly had the “j”, “k”, “l”, “m”and “n” keys behaving as the Great Keyboard God intended. But the Windows Registry Scancode Map key which KeyTweak uses, doesn’t seem to apply to what you might call the first floor of certain keys ... including, unfortunately, the question mark on the Eee PC. Instead of “?” it continued to type “/”.
At that point we brought in AutoHotKey. We’ve mentioned this free program briefly in the past after we used it to reposition the Eee PC’s poorly positioned right shift key.
But AutoHotKey has more interesting capabilities. It allows you to automate almost anything you do on a Windows PC by assigning and sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can even program your joystick.
It can automatically expand abbreviations as you type them. Enter “WTHIMQM” for instance, and your PC might type “Where The Hell Is My Question Mark?” In its latest version, released last month, it’s roughly three times as fast. With just a little tinkering, we got it to replace “/” with “?”.
We weren’t completely happy with our solution. We were finally reunited with our ? but we were troubled by the fact that this was a kludge, and our Eee PC was essentially broken.
The Bleeding Edge spouse struggled to suppress a smile when we moaned about this, but we were not going to be deflected. We wanted our computer back the way it was intended to be, with the exception of the right shift key.
We fired off an email to Asus, inquiring as to what might have happened to our question mark. That was when we learned about the peculiar workings of the Eee PC’s NumLock key. Engage it unintentionally, as the spouse had undoubtedly done, and a grid of keys on the right side of the keyboard shift become numbers and operators.
Disengaging it proved to be as simple as holding down the function key and pressing the NumLock key.
We did that, then removed all the remaps and the AutoHotKey script, and we suddenly had our ? back.
We’d like to ask Asus why there’s no more than a momentary warning that the NumLock function has been engaged, but we don’t want to put our little question mark under too much strain just yet. We’re sure that having spent most of the weekend lost in space, it’s feeling quite hysterical too.