ReplaceKeys

There are some particular keyboards specially built for different languages, coming with a different button layout. This might cause a bit of frustration, especially when you’re not used to typing without constantly looking at the keyboard. One practice is to use specialized applications like ReplaceKeys to temporarily fix the situation.

First of all, the application comes in a pretty lightweight package, requiring no installation in order to function. This enables you to store it on a USB flash drive to carry around and even use on other computers if necessary. What’s more, registry entries are not affected during runtime, so the health status remains intact.

Truth be told, the application is intended to be a simple prank, replacing a custom button on the keyboard with any other. You easily select the target and destination keys from a couple of drop-down menus, and you find more buttons than just numerical and alphabetical keys.

Once started, the application’s window hides to become a practical prank. Deactivating this option is easily done by moving the cursor to the top-left corner of the screen, time in which the window shows up again. It doesn’t minimize to the tray area, but it can be identified through the corresponding process inside Task Manager.

Apart from a joke, the application can fix a situation where you want to temporarily use different keys than their default function. Unfortunately, this can only be done for one button at a time, even if attempting to run multiple instances of the application. You can choose to only replace characters once every custom number of seconds.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that ReplaceKeys might come with the intention of helping you pull a prank on somebody, but some degree of actual practicality can be obtained as well. It would have been useful, though, to be able to replace more keys at a time.