TerraVirtua: The World According to Tim - how to hack custom keystrokes in intellipoint

The world according to Tim

(posted: 2006-02-15 22:45:31)

how to hack custom keystrokes in intellipoint

i am mostly posting this as a courtesy to others who might be googling for the same info i was, and coming up empty...

i just got a new microsoft intellimouse explorer 4.0 to replace my old first get intellimouse explorer... and it required a software update to intellipoint 5.2... unfortunately the new intellipoint took away the option of assigning the "alt-tab" keystroke to one of the buttons...

i decided this was absolutely unacceptable. i wanted this mouse to REPLACE my old one, ie, i want it to work JUST LIKE THE OLD ONE DID. so, some hacking was in order.

open the intellipoint software and add a custom keystroke (doesnt matter what, the "a" key or whatever) and apply and exit...

then open regedt32 and go to key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\IntelliPoint\EventMapping\

then look for the key under this branch as follows for the button you want to change:

4: wheel click
6: big/bottom side button
8: small/top side button

first, edit the "keystroke" value... to get alt-tab, enter 409 (hex)... if you want something else youll have to hack around to figure out what the keystroke is... but alt-whatever is always the base keystroke value + 0x400...

then change the keystroketext to whatever you want it to read (doesnt matter really) and viola! youre done!

(UPDATE) "piyo" has added more info on binding strange keystrokes to mouse buttons... see his response to this thread, or the re-post of his info. thanks piyo!

Comments:

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oab2

(2006-02-23 14:49:51):

WOW! This was the exact problem I had been having. I was going nuts trying to find the hex for Alt-Tab! I had used http://hardware.mcse.ms/message45921.html to get the Esc key to work but was banging my head against the wall trying to figure this out. Thanks alot!

piyo

(2007-02-05 20:15:26):

>i am mostly posting this as a courtesy to others who might be googling
>for the same info i was, and coming up empty...

Your post was the first "intellipoint hacking" result on Google. and it helped me with my Intellipoint 6.x problem. I'd like to return the favor:

The keystroke values are actually "virtual key codes". This is documented by Microsoft, for example, VK_TAB is equal to 0x09, VK_BACK (backspace) is equal to 0x08, etc. If you ever wanted to map a mouse key to some rare key like F24 (!) and then get some other key message handler such as AutoHotKey to catch it, you can do so if you know the "virtual key code".

Here is the documentation:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms645540.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winui/WinUI/WindowsUserInterface/UserInput/VirtualKeyCodes.asp

The ALT, CONTROL, SHIFT keys are as follows which I found by experimentation. Add these hexidecimal values with your desired normal key's virtual key code.

ALT == 0x400
CONTROL == 0x200
SHIFT == 0x100

Intellipoint 6.x seems to use the same Registry layout as your example.

Thanks and best regards.

jumai

(2008-06-14 18:54:52):

I was very happy to find this, thank you.

Is it at all possible to make the window icons in the alt-tab box selectable nicely? I would love to simply be able to select one with a mouseover and then release the alt-tab button but it seems more reasonable to ask if you could bind, say, the right mouse button to act as a tab keypress only when your alt-tab button was depressed, allowing you to use it to cycle through the windows while holding alt-tab.

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