Keyboards are important to me.

I used to love pretty, low-profile scissor-key style keyboards. After trying a ergonomic keyboard a few years ago and having it relieve my occasional wrist pain, I never went back. Typing on a non-split keyboard even feels strange now. For about two years I’ve been using the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard both at home and at work. There are a bunch of reasons that this is my favorite keyboard lately: the keys have a very solid action (not as much as the wonderful old IBM Model M, sadly), the enter key is on a single line (as opposed to keyboards with backwards-L shaped enter keys, which push the \ key to be moved elsewhere, often making for a smaller backspace key) and the angle and split of the keyboard has really helped my wrists.

One thing the keyboard does leave to be desired is a better set of media keys. The only “extra” keys I ever end up using on a keyboard are the media keys, so that I can control iTunes without context-switching.

Getting the media keys to control iTunes at all was a pain - iTunes only wanted to respond when it had focus, which obviously is missing the point. A while back I discovered an iTunes plugin called mmKeys which registered global hot keys for using media keys, which fixed that problem. The next problem, which I’ve been living with for a while, is that this keyboard has a play/pause button, and that’s it. If a song comes on that’s distracting me from working, I need to further distract myself by opening iTunes and skipping it. The keyboard does, however, have browser back and forward buttons, which seem perfect for re-mapping to track skip buttons. So last week I actually installed the drivers for the keyboard at home for the first time; the driver control panel has a utility for reassigning any key to a series of built-in functions. That didn’t quite work as expected - the play/pause button actually causes my media player window to raise and gain focus. Again, obviously missing the point.

Fortunately, the driver’s control panel does let you set a program to start when the key is pressed, instead of an action off of the default list. I googled around for command-line options to iTunes or APIs that I could use to write simple scripts for each action, and discovered someone had already done it for me. I’ve installed these scripts, and now I have exactly the control scheme I want.

Hopefully, by writing up my solution, I’ll have an easier time configuring my next machine. And just maybe I’ll help out someone googling for the answer too.