Friday, October 06, 2017

Re-map Right Windows key to Menu key on Windows

I purchased a decent mechanical keyboard; it's a ducky Shine 3.  Duckys (despite the strange name) seem to be very high quality mechanical keyboards.  This model, as with most of their models, has no menu / right-click key.  I use this key constantly.  Some of the other model's manuals indicate that there is some key-combination that will activate menu, but not this one.  This workaround will apply for any keyboard that lacks any built-in way to activate menu.
I don't use the right-windows key.  That key is in approximately the same spot as the menu key usually is (and I always look down to press the menu key), so I re-mapped that key to activate menu.

To get the proper value into the registry, I used SharpKeys.  That utility allows you to type in the keys you want to re-map, so I plugged in a different keyboard that actually had the menu key, typed in the keys to re-map, and saved the value to the registry (requires reboot after adding).  Thanks SharpKeys!

Here is all that is required in a .reg file in order to add this value to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,5d,e0,5c,e0,00,00,00,00