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Comment by Rasthor | Hacker News Reader

One of the later PowerToys updates makes the first few steps in the right direction with "fancy zones". It's not strictly native windows, but still developed by Microsoft and adds keyboard shortcuts for all its utilities

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PowerToys seems to be making two step forward, one step backwards, and then makes a leap in a random off-axis direction. Every time an update comes, I feel both joy and worry - I expect to see some new cool thing (and possibly even useful to me), but I also worry about bloat and random performance degradations. I haven't bothered with measuring and quantifying it properly, but I do feel PowerToys got heavier and slower over the last 2 years.

Ironically, 90% of use I get from them is remapping Caps Lock to CTRL. Which I historically did with AutoHotkey, which was much lighter, but then there's the 10% of the time I need something else from PowerToys...

The even simpler solution to remapping Caps Lock is to use SharpKeys, which applies registry settings to make use of Windows’ built-in remapping functionality.

TIL: SharpKeys

TIL: Windows has a built-in remapping functionality

TIL: That functionality is controlled by registry, meaning I wouldn't even need a tool in the first place (I've learned to write REG files as a kid).

Thanks!

Even lighter than autohotkey is remapping on the hardware of the keyboard. There's a lot of open source firmware options for that now in the custom scene

Yeah I found all the software based remapping to be a bit janky on Windows, ended up just doing it in the keyboard firmware instead to move my ctrl keys beside the spacebar.

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