How to remap a Short Circuited Key
Did you spill some water / coffee / soda / beer / vodka on your keyboard? Well chances are one or more of the keys are acting strangely. If it’s an important key like a vowel letter, I think you may have no choice other than to get a new keyboard. Fortunately they’re not too expensive and not hard to replace…even for a laptop! (ebay) But what if it’s a not so often used key? Maybe it makes more sense to disable or reassign the damaged key rather than getting a new keyboard. A good buddy of mine Peter Althaus has this exact problem. His shorted key in question was the German Special Letter ß. Whenever he typed the Letter T, both T and ß would show up.
[5:47:13 PM] koolkarma says: now tßhe damn ß is ßtyping ißtself witßhoußt me pushing anytßhing.
The solution? Remap the key! We can remap the ß key to all zeros and disable the key in windows. There are a few ways of doing this. The cleanest way is using regedit, but it requires us to have the binary values for the keys we want to remap, unfortunately that’s not nearly as easy as using this clever app: SharpKeys
Make sure you have the Windows .NET 2.0 Framework Installed!
Once you do it’s a pretty quick process to disable or remap the key and fix your problem! Install .NET 2.0 and SharpKeys and open it up. This is what the first page looks like.
Go ahead and click add, here we can remap our keys around the way we want them.
Capturing a Key with SharpKeys
If you click the “Type Key” button you can skip ahead of trying to find the key in the list. Sometimes the key may be too broken to be tapped, but if it isn’t, I definitely recommend this route.
When you’re all done press Okay, then press Write to Registry and reboot. I definitely recommend you both disable the bad key and assign it a replacement key at the same time. For example if your Right Shift Key is broken, disable it and reassign it to the Left Windows key all in one go. This way you can use the “Type Key” feature on both sides. Chances are between the Caps Lock, Left and Right Windows Key and other not so often used keys on the keyboard you’ll be able to find a new home for your damaged key.
