Keyman Desktop Free Edition

Keyman Desktop is a software application which can be used in order to remap your keyboard, tweak a few related options, as well as download and use multiple on-screen keyboards.

The interface you come across is clean and non-obtrusive, seeing it goes in the system tray from the first launch and sits there until called upon. You can interact with the utility through a pretty simple context menu, in order to switch it on and off, bring up an on-screen keyboard and configure options.

It also comes bundled with well-written and comprehensive Help contents, thus making sure that even people with no experience in the IT world can find their way around it, without encountering issues.

Keyman Desktop enables you to download and install a large number of on-screen keyboards and keyboard layouts, each being dedicated to specific languages or dialects. It is possible to view a list with all the available layout, as well as look for them according to language or country.

Once you install one, it is possible to view information pertaining to it in the settings panel, such as filename, package, encodings, layout type, copyright and version, while you can also input a keyboard shortcut for it, so that you can start using it with ease.

In addition to that, from the configuration panel, it is possible to set up hotkeys for multiple actions (e.g. turn app off, open keyboard menu, show on-screen keyboard, etc.). You can also tweak options such as showing hint messages, launching the tool at Windows startup, enabling debugging and switching Windows language when a keyboard is selected.

The computer’s performance is not going to be affected by this app as CPU and memory usage is low at all times, the response time is good and the Help file included is well-drawn.

Keyman Desktop is a pretty efficient software solution for people looking to customize their keyboard shortcuts, and add new keyboard layouts to their PC, with a user-friendly interface.