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Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] » WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
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WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts

I’ve extolled the virtues of WinKey before.  WinKey allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts using the windows key.  One example is to assign NOTEPAD to “winkey+N”.  Then, any time you need a notepad, instead of typing winkey+r, hitting ENTER, typing notepad, and then hitting Enter again, you just hit winkey+N.

One problem with WinKey is that it saves all your shortcuts to the registry.  So there was no easy way to copy your shortcuts to another computer or back them up in case of a hard drive crash.  This won’t be a problem any more!

That’s because I created WinKeySaver.  WinKeySaver saves all of your keyboard shortcuts to a simple XML file.  When you want to copy your shortcuts to another computer, just copy the XML file and run WinKeySaver again to load all your shortcuts.  That’s it!

NOTE:  I’ve only tested this on v1.1 of the framework.  If there is a need, I can do v1.0 too.

Posted 02-09-2004 6:58 PM by Darrell Norton

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Comments

JC wrote re: WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
on 02-09-2004 7:15 PM
To launch my apps I prefer Favalias (http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/favalias). You launch it using ONE shortcut (Win+S by default), and then you type an alias (for instance, "ntp" to launch notepad, "iis" to launch IIS manager...). Of course you can create your own aliases. I think aliases are easier to remember than a lot of shortcuts.
Iain wrote re: WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
on 02-09-2004 11:17 PM
I'm curious. Why not just use regedit to dump the relevant piece of the registry to a file which you can then import? Then you end up with two batch files, one to export the key and one to import it.

Wouldn't that be simpler?
Darrell wrote re: WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
on 02-10-2004 12:11 AM
JC - I prefer the many shortcuts, because with the shortcut I am straight into the program I want, rather than typing in a few more characters. Also, if I have to do that, I can just hit Win + R, and type in the executable name (such as notepad) which seems easier to me to remember than ntp. It's just a matter of personal preference.
Darrell wrote re: WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
on 02-10-2004 12:14 AM
Iain - That was probably easier to you! One goal I had was to write something that was useful to me, and the other was to play around in .NET. I didn't have the motivation to do what you are doing, but I did have the motivation to do what I did. :)

Plus, the RegistryGateway class I created is easily reusable should I ever have a need to access the registry from a .NET application.
Darrell wrote re: WinKeySaver - saves or loads all your WinKey shortcuts
on 02-24-2004 8:36 AM
Released WinKeySaver v1.01. It fixes a bug where running WinKeySaver before installing WinKey causes an unhandled exception.