Gadgetory

why on earth would anyone want a second keyboard Linus asked me when I tried to show him this project I've been working on for quite a while well let me tell you it's not for everyone but if you are a productivity freak like me the concept might really appeal to you basically this entire keyboard has been converted into a set of 87 fully programmable macro keys intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their new core i7 6700 K and Core i5 6600 K processors check out the link in the video description to learn more so to give you some background on why I need a second keyboard I'm the video editor for most of the videos that go up on this channel that's a lot of videos and the more quickly and efficiently I can edit them the better now fast and efficient video editing relies heavily upon keyboard shortcuts so much so that inside premiere I assigned functions to all the numbers letters and symbols all the function keys the entire numpad and most of the reasonable combinations of ctrl shift and alt that's a lot of shortcuts and yes I do use all of those on a daily basis it's easy to remember single key shortcuts but the more keys you need to press in a row the more difficult it is to not only remember the key combination but also to physically press those keys that's what macro Keys are good for if you don't know a macro key we'll basically launch a pre-programmed series of keystrokes and/or mouse clicks which you would otherwise have to press manually every time for example let's say I'm editing a video in Premiere and I want to reverse a clip on the timeline to do this I could click on the clip mouse over to the clip menu select speed duration mouse over to the panel that appears click reverse and then mouse over to enter and click on that this takes a few seconds to do alternatively I could just press one single macro button which automatically executes the keystrokes ctrl R tab tab space enter which accomplishes exactly the same thing but in a fraction of a second that's the power and usefulness of a keyboard macro gamers will use macros in games like World of Warcraft dota Starcraft League of Legends and so on but pretty much any game can be made easier with macros and keyboard macros are also really useful for certain jobs like video editing animation graphic design programming music creation and I don't know accounting maybe I don't really know what accountants do all day but pretty much anything that involves heavy computer use and repetitive tasks usually macros are just a series of blind keystrokes and mouse clicks but you can make even more powerful macros using autohotkey autohotkey is a free brilliant little program that you can use to completely automate repetitive tasks remap Keys intelligently simulate clicks and keystrokes and do a lot more stuff that I don't even understand I've used auto hotkey to program a ton of useful features for Premiere Pro that don't even exist in the application itself like recalling saved transitions and applying effects directly onto selected clips but my problem now is that I use so many macros and so many keyboard shortcuts that I have now physically run out of keys on the keyboard and what can you do then well we have a few of these cool little tech Keys keyboards lying around the office so I experimented with those we also have a Razer orb-weaver which is actually pretty awesome and it's been designed for this exact purpose all of its keys can be remaps to any key or key combination you desire now since you're still restricted to standard keyboard keys what I like to do is program the keys on these extra keyboards to execute very obscure key combinations like ctrl alt f1 and then I program autohotkey to listen for these key combinations and then execute whatever function I desire the trouble is if you do too much of this it's tough to remember what combinations you've already used and what combinations all your various different applications might already be using but you know what the tech keys keyboards and the orb-weaver still don't have enough keys for all the extra functions that I want and these keyboards are surprisingly expensive and that's when it hit me why can't I just hook up a second keyboard to my computer well it turns out that Windows will treat every keyboard that you plug in as one keyboard you can plug in all the keyboards you like but your computer cannot tell the difference but between them bummer fortunately one of my Twitter followers linked me to this video by Tom Scott who successfully got 14 keyboards to work as their own separate inputs he used a program called Lua macros which was actually developed for flight simulator enthusiasts who want to have a lot of switches and buttons for their virtual cockpits great so it is possible now all I needed to do was figure out how to code in Lua and find a way to get Lua macros to communicate with autohotkey which is where all of my functions already are Tom Scott had done this but he didn't provide any of the necessary details like you know sample code then it presses the f24 King themselves after quite a bit of frustration I finally figured out how to do it my second keyboard now works as its own unique input and every single one of these keys acts as a macro button which will launch its own unique autohotkey script so here's how you do it first download Lua macros and autohotkey plug-in both of the keyboards you want to use run Lua macros and open up QuickStart Lua then click on the play button you'll get a prompt asking you to identify device macros which will become the name of your second keyboard all you need to do is press any key on that second keyboard Lua macros will now recognize it as such and those keystrokes will now be intercepted by Lua macros and therefore blocked from normal typing once you get that working you can write your own code or download and use my Lua code which basically just writes a small string to a file on disk and then presses the f24 key download my autohotkey script or write your own and double click on it to get it running an icon for that script will now appear on the taskbar now any time the f24 key is virtually pressed by Lua macros this autohotkey script will read the string in that file and execute the correct associated function tada I knew it would be difficult to remember which key did what so I created a bunch of key cap images in Photoshop printed them cut them out and taped them onto the existing keys if you do this keep in mind that your key caps will not necessarily be compatible with every slot on the keyboard so you may have to be careful to maintain the underlying QWERTY layout although for me I think it was just the F and J keys the keyboard that I used for this project was the logitech k120 and it's nothing special at all any cheap or old keyboard will work perfectly when using the second keyboard it does take about two seconds to look down find the key you want move your hand over to that key press it and then move your hand back to the primary keyboard so it's best to use the secondary keyboard for secondary functions that you don't need all that often if you want to try building and programming a second keyboard I will be providing all the necessary code in the video description you're welcome and before you say it I know that my code is sloppy and suboptimal I know but guess what it still works so if any of you real programmers out there want to complain about my messy code I sure would appreciate it if you could provide a functional sample of some code that will work even better a great place to do this will be in the Linus tech tips discussion thread that is associated with this video also linked below there's still a lot to figure out like using modifier keys and double tapping to launch a different function in fact Lua macros itself is just a side project of a single man with very little free time it's not even out of beta and it still got a lot of bugs the good news is the software is open source so if you can help to make Lua macros better I really suggest that you do I think it would be great if we could use the power of our community to improve useful niche software like Lua macros personally I'm very satisfied with my secondary keyboard and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop it allows you to tunnel to 16 different countries and browse the internet and use online services as if you're in one of those other countries they have apps for iOS Android PC and Mac and they also have a Chrome extension when you pick a country and turn tunnel bear on two things will happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption the strongest available and your public IP address gets switched so you can show up as if you're in a different country with tunnel bear there's no need to mess around with port configurations DNS or router settings or all that nonsense it just handles all of that by itself you don't have to worry about it they also give you 500 megabytes of data for free so you can try it out no credit card required and if you want to upgrade to unlimited data you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm /l tt thanks for watching guys give the video a like or a dislike get subscribed join the forum and talk about Lua macros or whatever you can support us by changing your Amazon bookmarks to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy something and you should check out another one of my videos up here or wherever where I talk about the fly cly and how incredibly disappointing it was no the smartpen I keep forgetting what it was called it's terrible