Editing your keyboard, Windows (10)

Update 231026: A new update adding “Δ”

I live in France but communicate mainly in English. However, I do need to write in French on a regular basis and so to get the accents French requires like ç, è, û and à, along with non-French characters like ß, °,©, ®, ñ, ¿ and ¡ along with the em-dash —.

I could memorise all the alt-numpad codes for these characters (and have memorised my most used ones like alt-0231 for ç, alt-0232 for è or alt-0224 for à, but it’s a fag to do so and takes longer to type. So I was very happy when I discovered the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. It allows me to assign specific codes to keys. I already use the AltGr key to use the acute accent character é and to get a € symbol, but á isn’t exactly often used in French and nor is ó, í or ú so it makes sense to remap these keys and learn the appropriate alt-numpad code for them if I ever need them (I don’t think I have in 14 years of living in France).

You should really plan out all the keys you want to remap and where you want to remap them to before you start all this, but because I’m an impetuous sort and wanted to try different options out, I didn’t, which meant I got problems with having to rename the layout and change the description to make sure it’s unique.

When you install the MKLC and open it you will see a window that represents your keyboard, but empty of characters for the time being.

In the File menu choose Load Existing Keyboard… to load your current keymap to edit it.

The keys will then be populated and you can use the toggles to the left of the keyboard to see what modifiers are available or can be changed.

Then it’s a matter of clicking a key and adding your own definition — you can even have a single key type a sequence of up to four characters.

Once you have added the custom keys you want, visit the Project menu and choose Validate Layout. It will probably ask you to create unique settings for name and description if you are basing your customised layout on an existing one.

Once you have that set as you like use the Project menu again and choose Build DLL and Setup Package. If all goes well, there should be a new folder in your Documents folder (by default although you can choose where to make the setup folder) containing some MSIs and a Setup.exe. You can directly click on the MSI if you know which one to use, or simply start Setup.exe, which will choose the right MSI.

Next, you will want to make sure that your customised keymap is chosen as a default. I usually have my UK customised keyboard and a Japanese keyboard and switch between them using Windows-Space. added the language bar from my Control Panel so I can switch between keyboard layouts in case anything goes wrong, but you can of course simply remove the standard keymap in favour of your customised one. In any case, keep the original keyboard while you test your new customised one. You can remove it if all is well and the default keyboard can always be re-added.

Your settings window should look like this (but may be a different colour):

If you click on the language whose keyboard you have modified, you will see an Options button appear. You will be able to check that your customised keyboard has been loaded.

Here’s my current version of my UK customised keyboard. It has accented characters for French and a couple of other languages available directly using the Alt Gr key to the right of the space bar.

Character	Keypress (Alt Gr unless otherwise noted)	Added
à	a
â	s	210629
ä	z	210629
é	e
è	r
ê	w
°	d
Δ	Shift-Alt Gr d	231026
ù	u
û	y
ü	j	210629
ï	i	210705
î	k
ô	o
ö	p	210629
ç	c
Ç	Shift-Alt Gr c	210705
ß	b
ñ	n
μ	m
·	8
—	–
•	Ctrl-8
¡	Shift-Ctrl Alt 1
©	Ctrl-Shift c	210706*
®	Ctrl-Shift r	210706*
™	Ctrl-Shift t	210706*
¿	Shift-Alt Gr-/
«	Shift-Alt Gr 9	210705
»	Shift-Alt Gr 0	210705
≠	Alt-Gr =	220305

So, here’s the file for you. I will continue to update it.

If anyone has any requests for a character they’d like easier access to, or for me to do a different base character map (I already have the start of a US keyboard version of this keymap), let me know in the comments below.

Note: Edited in Virtualbox, X:\VirtualBox_share\Keyboards