A fun little project for USB Midi hardware

I like to not only work on stories, but also software testing whether it’s coding scripts to try to automate things, make a chatbot to work with discord- I used to mess with all of the latest Android software back in the day, and I’m always trying to find the perfect piece of software for whatever task may be at hand.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to make hotkeys be useful again in Windows, and on a laptop keyboard. In Linux hotkeys seemed to be instinctively the way to run things if you weren’t command-line bashing, but in Windows it seems to be the ‘ol point and click. And I don’t know what it is about a laptop keyboard, but to me it seems alright for typing, and really bad for things like hotkeys. I’m always hitting the right buttons when typing, but missing them whenever I need to hit a hotkey to open a program at the right time.

It’s kind of pointless to be this picky, it’s definitely a first world problem, but every problem has a solution, and I have found the answer to this only slight inconvenience. I have a midi device that plugs into the side of my laptop. It and the software I found online create a sort of stream deck type thing but where anyone is able to launch programs, run hotkeys, whatever they want to do at the press of a single button, instead of having to learn new finger gymnastics to get to the hotkeys on a keyboard that isn’t friendly. So now to make a new post on my website all I have to do is press one button, and I can have it launch firefox to get to the url I requested.

I’m seeing potential for writing scripts that check to see if certain tabs are open already and not run the command if the tab is already open, but we will see. I just got a full time job again finally and have had to spend time trying to get my truck up and running so it’s a new schedule to get used to.