Tap Tap Hotkey Extender

DonationCoder has produced a number of useful utilities, and today they contacted us to let us know about a new one: TapTap Hotkey Extender. As is often the case with DonationCoder applications, TapTapHotkey Extender is a tiny little utility that takes up almost no resources, and does one simple thing well.

The idea behind TapTap Hotkey Extender is to to take typical hotkey shortcuts, and simplify them by offering the option to map them to a double-tap of a common key like CTRL, ALT, SHIFT or WINDOWS. You have the option of specifying the left or right version of the key you want to map to, as well as added configurability with respect to simply remapping key combinations to something more convenient.

While the application works exactly as advertised, you'll find that there is no graphical interface for creating your mappings; there's a configuration file that must me manually edited. Thankfully, the there is a help file included with the application, which can often be overlooked for small utilities like this. Also, the configuration file is well laid out, and includes lots of explanatory text, so even for those that are new to manually configuring software like this it should be fairly straightforward.

But this brings me to my next thought; as I was busy putting together some mappings that made sense for my system, I couldn't help but think how similar it felt to AutoHotKey, and that if I was clever enough I could probably figure out how to do many of the same things in AutoHotKey. Now in terms of syntax, TapTapHotkey Extender is definitely more simple and approachable. If all you're looking to do is remap a few hotkeys and add the double-tap functionality, AutoHotKey is probably overkill for you, and TapTap Hotkey Extender is a good bet for you. But if you're looking for even more functionality, or you already use AutoHotKey, you might want to consider extending your AutoHotKey script to include double-tap functionality.

Interestingly, the authors of TapTap Hotkey Extender are well aware that AutoHotKey exists, and is capable of similar functionality. In fact, right in the help file, they provide a link to an AutoHotKey script that adds the double-tap functionality of TapTap Hotkey Extender in a few lines of code. Personally, I think it's really cool of them to tip their hat to AutoHotKey and show you exactly how to go about using a different tool to get the same functionality. And I think there's definitely room for both TapTap Hotkey Extender and AutoHotkey in the key-mapping software space; they both do what they do extremely well, and each are well suited to a different type of user.

Tags: AutoHotkey, double tap, DoubleTap, freeware, Hotkeys, TapTap Hotkey Extender, TaptapHotkeyExtender, utility