Special char macro tool



  • I'm looking for a replacement of some old bit of software I use.

    I currently have this very old special-chars tool. By old, I mean, like, pre-XP. It just works so well, I've kept it from every computer to the next. It's called AllChars, and with it, you can:

    • expand simple keyboard combos into special characters like ë á ø € ß µ – — © ™ ² ³ etc. etc. etc. This is bloody awesome.
    • expand short macros into annoying strings, such as:
      /in => '+  +'
      /det => document.getElementsByTagName('')
      /pic => [img]http://www.pliv.com/things/[/img]

      This is also bloody awesome.


    So that's good.

    Unfortunately, it also crashes nearly every application that uses Direct2D, Direct3D or openGL as soon as I hit a key. This includes practically all games, Safari, Google Earth etc. Maybe it has what I think may be a bit of a hackish way to hook itself into the keyboard. Anyway.

    Additionally, when UAC on Vista+ is enabled, it doesn't respond to commands at all. I think Vista doesn't like how it sends keys to the keyboard buffer and just stops it silently.

    So that's not good.

    So. Anyone has a proper replacement that sort of does the above except wihtout all the crashing?



  • I'm still googling around -- haven't found an all-in-one solution yet, but my google-fu isn't very strong today..
    I'm sure that if you posted specs for the application someone would write a functional thingy for you.

    Or at the very least it would be the next new feature in SSDS, complete with random random random.



  • Or alternatively, as this is Open Source, just fix it yourself.



  • Is it Open Source?  I didn't get that.



  • It looks like there's an alpha version (maybe beta now?)  that's compatible for Vista.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars/files/ 

     

    Edit:

    Looking at the dates, this looks like it might be abandoned.  Who knows, maybe Version 5 (the newest, not the stable release) will work.



  • @frits said:

    It looks like there's an alpha version (maybe beta now?)  that's compatible for Vista.
     

    Hah, that's actually better than I expected. I thought it was deadware years ago.


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