HotKeyboard

A simple AutoHotkey script that adds nifty multilingual support to your keyboard using right Alt key (a.k.a. AltGr)

What is it for

• Are you constantly switching between different keyboard layouts?
• Are you fed up with all the typos made when you forget to check which one is active?

HotKeyboard is a script that will add all the missing characters to your main keyboard layout, so you won't have to bother with switching layouts ever again. You can access these extra characters by holding AltGr (right Alt) key and then pressing the base key of a character.

Some examples:

Keys combination	Outcome	Languages character occurs in
AlrGr + a	á	Czech, Slovak , ...
AlrGr + Shift + a	Á	Czech, Slovak, ...
AlrGr + e	é	Czech, Slovak, French, ...
AlrGr + e + e	ě	Czech
AlrGr + s	š	Czech, Slovak, ...
AlrGr + s + s	ß	German
AltGr + ?	¿	Spanish

Your base keyboard layout is unaffected by the script. The only ecxeption is the right Alt key, which will stop acting as an "Alt" key, as it will become a new modifier key.

This concept is similar to the "International US keyboard" that is present on Windows operating system but has several advantages over it:

1. It fully covers multiple latin alphabets.
   • You can get to different special characters by pressing the base key repeatedly.
   • e.g. AltGr + n will give you "ň" (Slovak) but AltGr + n + n will give you "ñ" (Spanish)
2. It's adjustable to your specific needs.
   • You can easily modify the keyboard based on your language preferences. Just change the hotkeyboard.ahk file and create your very own version. It's easier then you might think.
3. It's compatibile with any base keyboard layout.
   • Your base layout will stay the same, so your colleagues and friends won't have a hard time when typing on your computer (and vice versa).

Usage

1. Download and unzip the current version of HotKeyboard
2. Run the stand-alone hotkeyboard.exe file.
   • A green icon indicating that the script is running should appear in your system tray.
   • 
3. If you want to run the HotKeyboard on each startup, run the enable_exe_on_startup.bat file.

Alternatively you can install AutoHotkey scripting lnaguage and then run the hotkeyboard.ahk source file. Use this option if you want to customize the keyboard (hotkeyboard.ahk is esentially just a text file that you can edit according to AutoHothey syntax).

I recommend using a standard US keyboard as the base layout, especially if you are a programmer.

Supported languages

• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• English
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Norwegian
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Polish
• Portuguese

Language alternatives

As of now, there are 4 different HotKeyboards you can choose from:

File name	Description
hotkeyboard_sk.ahk	Slovak characters only.
hotkeyboard_cz.ahk	Czech characters only.
hotkeyboard_cz+eu.ahk	Default. Characters from all supported languages. Optimised for Czech.
hotkeyboard_cz+eu+scripts.ahk	Same as above but with Capslock key set to execute custom users scripts.

The hotkeyboard.exe file is a compiled equivalent of a hotkeyboard_cz+eu.ahk file.

License

Feel free to create new versions optimised for different language combinations!

• You can check for more info on github.
• Scancodes for keyboard keys can be found here.