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Avanade issues Toshiba laptops to our consultants – well equipped M3’s.  My initial beef with these machines when I first got my hands on one was the absence of a Right-Ctrl key… immediately followed by fear that my desk would catch fire from the heat this thing spits out.  There’s not much I can do about the heat as far as I know, but you can create a Right-Ctrl key pretty easily.

I’m a Right-Ctrl freak.  A common keystroke sequence for me is to move my right hand’s index and middle fingers to the Right-Ctrl and Right-Shift key respectively, press both and hold, and use my thumb and ring fingers to whack at the arrow keys.  This method is my primary means for navigating a text document of any kind.  All modern Window’s based text editors supports moving the cursor from word to word (as opposed to by-character) using the Ctrl+<arrow> combination.  Similarly, batches of words can be selected via the cursor using the Shift+Ctrl+<arrow>.

I’m a keyboard guy – I minimize my trips to the mouse as much as possible.  Without the Right-Ctrl key, my text editing world is hosed. I simply could not train myself to move and select words with two hands – obviously I can’t use the Left-Ctrl and Left-Shift keys AND the arrow keys with my left hand… not quickly anyway.

Enter…. KeyTweak.

I must admit, this utility feels junky, but I’ve been using it’s keyboard remapping of my Right-Alt key for ~6 months with no problems.  Any Toshiba laptop owning keyboard freaks out there might want to check this out.  I’m sure there are dozen out there that can do key remapping for you, but this one is free and seems to work nicely.

Simply click key 62, set the Choose New Remapping drop down to “Right Control”, click Remap Key, click the Apply button, and of course reboot.  62 truly is your Right-Alt key enough though the visual keyboard does not show it as such according to Toshiba’s scheme.