I recently decided to replace my creaky old Acer Aspire One netbook with a brand new Lenovo Miix 2 8". So far I'm pretty happy with it, despite a couple of minor niggles. Having a full Windows desktop available in such a compact form is rather convenient. This convenience is marred however by a lack of physical keys, so I decided to search for an external keyboard solution.

What I settled for is one of these IVSO keyboard cases from Amazon. This keyboard has quite a few things I like about it. Firstly, it's quite cheap. Secondly the keyboard is held in place by a magnet which means it can be removed quite easily if you want a table form factor. Pairing with the device is a doddle, and I've been really impressed with the battery life. Finally the shape of the keyboard reminds me of a 48k Spectrum.

It's not all good however. Firstly the layout is rather cramped (and also an American one). As I type this I'm still getting used to using the Fn key to toggle certain symbols (like ' and @). This I accept, as every compact keyboard will have an associated learning curve. The biggest annoyance I had with it is that I was seemingly unable to use the Alt-F4 combo to close a window; one of my most used short-cuts. Fortunately I've found a solution in the form of a piece of software called Auto Hot Key

I've only started to scratch the surface with this fantastic piece of software. Using the key history feature of AHK I was able to diagnose that when I was hitting the Alt key, it was actually registering as a Ctrl-RAlt combo thus rendering the Alt-F4 combo useless. Using the following script I change Ctrl-RAlt-F4 to send an Alt-F4 combo:

^>!F4::
Send !{F4}
return
	

As I use the keyboard more I'm sure I'll find other ways of making it more usable through the use of AHK scripts.