You know if we just settled on English as the only language we wouldn’t need all these kinds of utilities. Plus keyboards could be standardized and dissenting thought could be stamped out!

:) Oh, that was a recurring thought as I fumbled with KinKey. The original version was actually much more complex, allowing for insertion of Greek, Esperanto, and whatnot, but it relied on Unicode. And frankly, everytime I’ve come even near to Unicode things quickly become a nightmare of incompatibility and arcana.

So yeah, it’s frightening the amount of (needless) effort that has to be poured to make babel workable.

Nice, but what about the swedish å? It is mycket important. Saludos!

Supongo que es kin por familia, algo asi como la familia global, pero apoco no suena como kinky?? Jejeje ;)

I did think of Ã¥ (because of you actually, I don’t know anyone else who speaks Swedish) but I couldn’t find a nice key combination to produce it ((k)a% and %. is problematic). I’ll see if I can add it someway elegant for the next version.

As for the name, KinKey was meant to sound like “kinky”! :) Trying to find meaning in “kin” is pure apophenia^WP.

it’s also useful for the Catalan language

gracias, me has ahorrado tiempo.

¡I lóvé it! :-).

However, it would be great if you could extend the AutoHotKey script to support all European languages with Latin alphabet. I am really missing Czech characters. Except for what is already there, we use also accent in �, carons for ČĎĚŇŘŠŤŽ, and a round in Ů. If you send me the AutoHotKey script, I volunteer to include these in it :-).

Was the reason you did not want to use A. to produce å that it would slow down the typing of the full stops? In that case, the carons could be entered like C[ and the round could be entered like A] or U].

Cheers!

Glad you liked it Adam!

Yes! The reason I didn’t use A + . to produce Ã¥  is that then you would be finishing a sentence with a word ending in a and you would sometimes annoyingly notice (or worse, you wouldn’t!) that an Ã¥ was written instead. Along KinKey’s development it really hit me how complicated it is to modify something as basic as the keyboard—there are always unexpected side effects. That’s also the reason why it is A + % (instead of the more logical (k)A% + : or A + ”), why (k)A% + 3, why A + \, and why A + / (though this last one is problematic with paths, URLs, and HTML). In general, these clashings are an important reason for KinKey’s narrow focus.

But the crucial reason for keeping KinKey oversimple has been the mire that is Unicode. The only way I knew of inserting it involved a clipboard hack that was moodily unreliable, and, again, with something so fundamental as the keyboard there has to be almost perfect reliability.

So even though I liked your C + [ idea I thought I would have to advise you against it, being carons Unicode. But then I trawled the AHK forums in search of hope and I found it in some wundercode referred as the shimanov code that promises to input unicode universally and reliably (albeit, alas, obscurely).

This, however, send me reeling again into the grand-vision KinKey—the KinKey that outputs every letter from the Geek alphabet (through the beta code, natch), every math symbol Wikipedia knows, and well nigh every letter from “the extended latin alphabet.” The devil, however, is in the details, and I’ve been stumbling with several of them during the long days I delayed my answer. In particular, I think the KinKey method, what Jef Raskin calls overstriking, may not be the way forward. I’ve been studying with renewed interest the Laszlo scheme I so easily dismissed at first for being too abstract. It involves the neat concept of character rings (read Laszlo’s 8-paged PDF article for a detailed intro) and may prove just perfect mixed with KinKey in some strategic places. We’ll see.

Anyway, what I realized is that polished, grand-vision KinKey won’t be ready in the near, this-week future and so here I am forcing myself to answer back without a good solution :).

Here is the code of the current KinKey (which, btw, has always been available from the EXE, see Exe2Ahk), and here—AHK, EXE—is the code of a modified version that outputs the carons and the rounds thru your method. (Though warning, there is a bug with big caps E caron, E, that erases several characters. No idea why it happens.)

Hope this helps.

Eliazar, thank you so much for the new build. I will be using it and will let you know about my experience. I have just tried it on the Czech diacritics pangram “příliÅ¡ žluÅ¥ouÄ?ký kůň úpÄ›l Ä?ábelské ódy” (the too yellow horse moaned devil’s odes) and it worked just lovely. The behavior of the caron-ized E is really mysterious but don’t worry about it: There’s no Czech word beginning with Ä› and so I don’t think I would need that often because I usually don’t type ALL CAPS. Thanks, cheers!

:-)

Now it’s getting complicated: First, I made a typo when writing “think, and when I was trying to submit an erratum, the message got interpreted only as a)”.

Hi elzr, I congratulate you for Kinkey, it’s a great utility!! Just a question, can I change form of acute accent from /a to ‘a and configure delay to this action?

Thank you very much, greetings from Chile.

hey!!! KinKey works on Vistaaa!!

woohoo!

Great utility, elzr! A little question: if I want to enter a ñ, I have to press ~ + n, but ~ is a key that requires Shift to enter on a US keyboard, so I always end up with a Ñ. How’s that supposed to work?

By the way, do you know about the “US – International” keyboard layout? It uses ‘dead keys’ (e.g., you press the ’ followed by the ‘a’ to get á) and also works for a lot of other scripts. Give it a try, I’ve been using it for years now and I find it very useful.

@CK: I’m sorry, your ñ problem is due to the ambiguity of my instructions: to get an ñ just press n + the key with the ~ label. In general, you need to press the key labeled with the modifier, not the key combination that would output the modifier.

As for the US International keyboard, you’re right, it’s cool stuff, but as a programmer, it kills me that I have to retrain myself to a new way of entering the dead keys (dead key + space). Besides, dead keys introduce modes^WP greatest enemies.

How i make degree symbol?

regards, santiago

Hi santiago, you can’t actually insert a degree symbol through KinKey but if you have Windows just try Alt + 248. (that’s it, hold Alt down, press 2, 4, 8, and release Alt).

I wish there were an å. So necessary for svenska!

Hi Elzr,

I like it! Many thanks!

Hi Elzr,

Is there a way to prevent the application from starting with the Windows start? I need to start it manually. I removed it from msconfig. But every time I start the application it added itself again. If there is an option that can disable/enable this feature, it will be very useful, I think.

Thanks for consideration.

Hi Mina,

Ah, yes, that’s a “feature”! Sorry if it’s bothersome, KinKey was designed to be as unobstrusive as I could make it and so it made sense to me to have it autostart.

Here is a version of script that doesn’t autostart for you. To run it you’ll have to install AutoHotkey, which is the program that I used to make the script. I don’t have a Windows machine right now so I can’t package it into a standalone exe for the moment (You could even do it yourself very simply with ahk2exe).

Hope this helps meanwhile and I’m happy you liked KinKey! :)

I love KinKey and have used it for so long now. But somehow, in trying to install on a new laptop running Windows 7 and using AVG anti-virus software, AVG identifies KinKey.exe as containing a worm… This is a false positive, right? Anyone else have this issue?

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for using KinKey! Yes, if you downloaded KinKey from my server: http://elzr.com/exe/KinKey.exe this is a false positive.

KinKey was built as a script of a robust automation program called AutoHotkey. Packaging those scripts as a program has been known to trigger the odd false positive on antivirus software.

I’m happy KinKey still works on Windows 7 as I have moved to all-Mac a few years ago and have had no occasion to even play with wintels lately.

Happy KinKey usage!

-Eli