CatchChar

The classic keyboard is already fitted with a large variety of alphabetical, numerical, and even special characters. However, input requirements can stretch far beyond what your keyboard can cover by default. In this regard, CatchChar wants to give you the possibility to enter the character of choice with ease from a customizable menu.

Most of the time is spent in the tray area by the application, and only shows up in the form of a clean menu when a specific character is requested. However, the tray icon also lets you access the configuration panel, where you have full control over what characters are put at your disposal, and the visual design.

The menu already comes with several symbols which are not regularly found on a keyboard just to give you an example of how things work. Unfortunately, the list is pretty shallow so you need to add more unless these are enough.

Adding a new item to the list is simply done by pasting it inside the dedicated field. It’s a good idea to bring up the Windows Character Map to help add more items. On the bright side, the input fields is not limited to a single character, which means you can write entire text strings to be inserted at the press of a button.

Separators can be included in the set as well to create custom groups. The set of characters is saved to file, so you can load the one you need with ease. The application allows you to change the trigger hotkey to bring up the menu. It works regardless of your location, and is capable of properly inserting the selected string or character in most text fields.

All things considered, we can state that CatchChar is sure to come in handy as a custom character map to use when working with letters or symbols not normally found on a keyboard. It’s easy to configure thanks to the intuitive design, with the possibility to also add text strings instead of single characters.