send-em-tiny.exe : rename me to choose which unicode character to send

in #utopian-io6 years ago

Repository

https://github.com/quole/sendemtiny

New Project

send em tiny is a Windows utility to make it easy to configure keyboards and mice from many vendors—including Razer, Logitech, and Corsair—using their own configuration tools, so that they can output a Unicode character on a key/button press.

send em tiny is designed to work with mouse/keyboard config utilities to add the ability to send a Unicode character from a key or button press.

Motivation/background: It was too difficult to configure my mouse to send an emdash (—), and when it did, it did a poor job. The mouse/keyboard configuration tool from a hardware vendor typically allows you to customize macro keys/buttons, but they make it overly difficult to have a simple Unicode character assignment. For example, em dash "—" or an emoji tiger "🐯" cannot simply be assigned to a macro key/button in Razer Synapse (nor in Logitech SetPoint). You can't paste the Unicode character or emoji anywhere and you can't enter the Unicode hexcode.

So I made this tiny program to send an emdash which my mouse drive utility could launch when a button was pressed. But then there was the question of how to generalize it, so I wouldn't have to create another application for every single Unicode character (command line parameters aren't an option), so the idea of renaming the executable file itself came to mind.

Quick guide

quick guide instructions. Mouse image CC-BY 2.0 Osman Gucel (via flickr)

When send em tiny is run (launched) by your keyboard or mouse driver, it searches its own filename for a capital U followed by a Unicode hex code, sends that character as if it was typed by a keyboard, and then exits. Text before the 'U' is ignored.

Technology Stack

Written in C# using .NET (4.6).

Roadmap

A larger version is planned (send em... full? name suggestions welcome), and will also be open source:

  • Longer text (not just a single character)
  • Different ways of entering Unicode including literal text
  • Menus (select Unicode or an Emoji from a menu)
  • Timing settings (e.g. milliseconds between virtual keystrokes)

License

MIT (open source)

How to contribute?

Contribute via github, let me know how it works with your specific mouse or keyboard driver/utility, or find some other way to motivate me to work on this. I hope it's useful. A large part of the work of developing this has been creating documentation and information such as this post and the github readme.

GitHub Account

https://github.com/quole/

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Since your project is in its early stages utopian will give you a little incentive ;)
But I think your next contribution should be much significant. Your helper does a very precise task that may be not really used and it's really not user friendly :p. Let's be honest copying and renaming the same file other and other again is not great.

Why not passing the code as argument ?

sendemtiny.exe u2014
sendemtiny.exe u2015

and assign this as hotkey in the constructor software ?

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Thanks for the response and feedback!

Passing an argument to the program would be the obvious and sensible thing to do, but unfortunately none of the driver software I tested (four different programs all by different vendors) allowed you to include an argument when you select an external executable, thus the need to "pass an argument" by renaming the executable itself. There's little room given for extending the driver utility software without having many executable targets, so at least this way they can be the "same" target, just renamed.

I've put some work into the documentation to make it an easy to use as possible, considering it should work with the driver software of multiple vendors.

This is my first contribution on utopian.io, and I have more significant contributions that I'm working on. Thanks again.

You could take in multiple arguments, and then run the code for each of them in different threads

I'm struggling to see what you're trying to achieve or how it relates to the problem?

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