MoreKeys does… more

Wait! What? Why did I put the pun in the title instead of here? D’oh!

First released a little over a year ago, MoreKeys is an application designed to make it easier to enter ‘extended’ characters – those not normally found on a standard keyboard – in a way that was inspired by the on-screen keyboard on developer Rick Murray’s mobile phone.

The software works by having a selection of characters assigned to particular keys, in easily updated mappings files; pressing Ctrl and Alt along with that key presents the characters assigned to it across the bottom of the screen, from where the user can select the appropriate one quickly and easily using the cursor keys.

The MoreKeys window for Ctrl-Alt-S which, by default, represents 'symbols'. The relevant part of the mappings file is displayed above.
The MoreKeys window for Ctrl-Alt-S which, by default, represents ‘symbols’. The relevant part of the mappings file is displayed above.

Back in March, Rick announced an update to MoreKeys, bringing it up to version 0.08, with the following list of changes:

  • The software now looks for configuration and keyboard mappings first in Choices, and then within its application directory.
  • The distribution now includes the German Latin1 mapping, kindly created by Carlos Michael Santillán.
  • The application now routinely checks the configured keyboard and alphabet, because RISC OS does not broadcast all of this information when it is changed, and if an unsupported configuration is encountered, the MoreKeys Ctrl-Alt behaviour is disabled.
  • And, of course, there are bugfixes and revisions of some code.

For readers of the RISC OS Open forums – or anyone capable of following a link, even if they don’t read it normally – it’s worth reading Rick’s announcement there, which is a copy of his usenet post but with details of an additional “colourful” mode which he describes as a special extra for forum readers.

Related posts