15-Minute Reviews :: Comfort Keys v2.0.3.1

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Comfort Keys version 2.0.3.1 by Comfort Software Group – An application to aid you with creating an array of keyboard shortcuts as well as a few other features.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Stop typing the same text over and over again! Now you don’t need to go through numerous menus to find the necessary program or web page. With this new generation hotkey manager you can leave your mouse alone and configure hotkeys for all of your actions – just like real pro’s do.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is relatively easy to use
• Keyboard shortcuts are powerful – Allows use of Windows key
• Templates functionality handy for those needing blocks of text often
• Clipboard manager very handy extra
• A few other handy features to make life easier

Quick Cons

• Did find myself getting lost occasionally in settings
• No mouse support in macro recording

Expansion

Upon first launching the application, you are greeted by the Initial Settings Wizard. Here you will set up a range of settings, including on-screen keyboard theme selection, which stock keyboard shortcuts you’d like to install, and allow for blocking of the Win keys in full-screen mode (Such as games – Very useful); With this wizard, you are also briefly introduced to the Templates Manager in demo form, as well as the Clipboard Manager demo. I will describe this further after.

Once you have completed the wizard, the application lands in the System Tray, ready to use. Upon right-clicking the System Tray icon, you will find a short menu, including the ability to temporarily disable the application, turn on or off the on-screen keyboard, adjust/add keyboard shortcuts, activate other shortcut files and options. Within the options window is a series of other options not provided to you in the initial wizard, but many of them were set to what I would want anyways. This is also where you would access your Templates as well (As well as through the keyboard shortcut) and a few of the other settings. Most of the application gives you little tips above each window, highlighted with a blue ‘i’ icon and a yellow box, which I found helped me at points. I did find myself getting a little lost in the options; Fortunately, you don’t access the options often.

When you open the Keyboard Shortcuts Settings area, you are presented with your on-screen keyboard, some tips along the top and a menu. A great aspect to this application is that you can have multiple files holding your keyboard shortcuts, so you can even manage what sets are available at what time, or even share your shortcuts. The on-screen keyboard shows you which keys have a shortcut (or multiple shortcuts) on it, starting with the initial key. It is handy in that it doesn’t overwhelm you with all of the keypresses; Instead, it displays the first steps of the keypress. When you click on one key, it will then show you the second step of the keypress, and so forth. It makes finding shortcuts relatively easy. For adding new shortcuts, you can either choose the key combination this way, or click on the Key Combination box and hit the combination. Something that sets this application apart from the many others I have used in the past is that this one can (And by default heavily uses) the Windows key, but you are not restricted to that keypress; In actuality, you can set up (almost) any combination of keypresses. There is a lengthy list of what you can apply to a shortcut: Run program; Open URL; Paste text; Paste text from Templates; Play keystroke macro; Perform any of the Comfort keys actions (There is a lot of these too); Change language or case; A selection of system actions; Block shortcut from being used (Get rid of that pesky Caps key for example); And Replace shortcut (May be useful to reassign Caps). It is fairly powerful – Granted, it could use more, but what you can’t do here, you can suppliment with the Run program.

Besides being a hotkey application, this application does toss quite a few other features in the works. First off, there is the Templates functionality; The Templates name is a little misleading, in actuality it is essentially designed for large-block text, rich text or image insertion via a menu/quick entry model. Essentially, when you hit the default (you can reassign) hotkey of Win+Space, it will bring up a templates dialog box. The quickest way to use this is to type in the name of the template until it highlights in the window, and then hit Win+Space (Or click Ok) and it will replace the text and add the template. As an added aspect to this, you can also include some macro functions inside of the templates as well: Date-time stamp, simulate keypresses, insert the body of a file, insert selected text or the clipboard contents, as well as the ability to have specific phrases randomly chosen (Good to make a canned email/message not feel canned).

Also included in this application is the Clipboard Manager. By default, to open the Clipboard Manager, you hit Win+Insert. When the Clipboard Manager opens, you are greeted by a window that shows a list of recently-clipped items in a scrollbox on the left (Up to the setting you chose in the options), and on the right the content of the currently-selected clip (If by some chance you can’t read it in full on the right), as well as options on what format to paste as. You can click which you want, or you can also hit they key listed in each clip (0-9), making picking older clips very quick.

There a lot of other goodies as well. There is an alternate to the Alt-Tab pop-up window that is designed to make seeing what the applications are easier and allow for more on-screen for task-switching. There is also a Process History option as well, making it easy to re-launch a recent application or file (again for the first 10 is 0-9 for quick-select). There is also a collection of other Comfort Keys hotkey options as well.

One of my desires for this application is for macros which include mouse movement as well as keyboard actions, or moreso a more powerful macroing functionality, though granted you could use this still in conjunction with precompiled macros to do the same thing.

Final Verdict

This application covers a lot of functionality. Granted, it may not have all the bells and whistles possible, it isn’t far off, and provides a lot of little unexpected functionality as well. For free, if you like your hotkeys, this may be a great application for you to try. As for paying $24.95 for this title, I would say it is definitely worth it if you’re in the market for a hotkeys application.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, October 25, 2007