map private character editor to keyboard

Drag the shortcut for your script to the Startup folder. In the dialog, type 'shell:startup' to open your Startup items folder.Ĥ. Right-click your script, and choose Create Shortcut from the contextual menu.ģ.

It will work without a hitch.Īfter this, you will want to add the script to your start-up items so that you don't have to launch it manually every time you turn on your computer. Once it's running, go into any application and try it out. Now double-click the script to run it for the first time.Ĩ. A double-colon separates the keystrokes from the special character you want to map to those keystrokes.)ħ. (The '!' is the Alt key, and the '+' is the Shift key. Beneath that, enter the following to create my keyboard shortcuts for em and en dashes. The script will open up in Notepad, and you'll see some default text at the top. Right-click the new script, and choose Edit Script from the contextual menu.ĥ. (Mine, for example, is 'em and en dash.ahk.')Ĥ. After you've launched it, go to your Desktop (Win-D) right-click on the desktop and choose New > AutoHotKey Script.ģ. It works in any application (including text boxes inside browser windows). For example, I've set Alt-hyphen to produce an en dash and Shift-Alt-hyphen to produce an em dash (the equivalent of Option-hyphen and Shift-Option-hyphen on the Mac). Using AutoHotKey, you can map any key combination to any character - or even sequence of characters.

This was especially concerning for me, since I'm using a Surface Pro 4, which lacks a numeric keypad.Īfter a little research, I discovered pretty much every Windows user had apparently resigned themselves to using awkward key combinations or copying/pasting from Word or Character Map - or just avoiding em dashes altogether.īut there is a simple, universal and permanent solution to this problem using a free and open source tool called AutoHotKey.

I was a little bit surprised to find that in all these intervening years, there was still no quick and simple way to type special characters like em dashes, en dashes, bullets and degree symbols by default. I'd been using Macs exclusively since 1987 before switching to Windows about a month ago. Your Windows mobile device doesn't have a numeric keypad, so how do you type characters like em dashes or bullets without having to open Word or Character Map? Tutorial How to Create Keyboard Shortcuts for Special Characters in Windows 10

Map private character editor to keyboard