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3 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS
Look at the very end of your Downloads folder! The folder is called "MSKLC" too. It has a "modified" datestamp of 1st October 2020.
You can just start typing "msklc" in the Downloads folder and it should show you the folder.
Open the folder and run setup.exe to install it:)
Creating the layout
1. Once it's installed and you've opened the program, go to File → Load existing keyboard...
2. Select your keyboard layout. I'm assuming you're using the US layout but choose accordingly.
3. Click on the spacebar in the layout view.
4. A window will appear, titled "VK_SPACE". If the 'Advanced View' checkbox isn't marked, tick it to open the advanced view. The box near the bottom, labelled "shift+ctrl+<Key>" is where you're gonna put the nbsp character.
5. Paste this: U+00a0 into the box, like so, then press OK.
6. To check that the non-breaking space character saved properly, tick the Shift and Ctrl boxes in the left-hand panel. They toggle different states of the keyboard, and will show what each key does in that state. Hover your mouse cursor over the spacebar and it should show a popup that reads "U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE", like so:
7. Click the Project menu and open Properties.
8. Name your layout, and give it a description.
8a) The name has to be 8 characters max, and I recommend including "01" so that you can create additional versions if there is a problem or if you decide to add more custom characters to your keyboard. (If you like customization, it can get addictive!)
8b) The description is what you'll see in the popup menu when you cycle through keyboard layouts with Win+Space (or whatever your shortcut is set to).
9. Test the keyboard layout. Go to Project → Test Keyboard Layout.
9a) Type lots of 'm's (because they're the widest character) until they overflow one line.
9b) Use Ctrl+Shift+Space to insert a non-breaking space near the end of the row of 'm's. You should find that the row does not break:)
10. Project → Validate Layout. As long as you haven't done anything else, you should be greeted with this successful verification message:
11. Project → Build DLL and Setup Package. This will create the keyboard layout file and the installer for it.
Click yes to open the folder where it saved the setup files.
Installing the layout
12. Run setup.exe. Windows will ask you for administrator privileges in the fullscreen user account control thing that Windows does.
13. The installer will just install the keyboard layout immediately. Hopefully it succeeded!
14. Open the language settings in Windows settings. (You can just type "language" in the Start menu search.) Click on Keyboard.
15. You should see the "Override for default input method" section at the top. From the drop-down menu, choose your new keyboard layout.
16. The new layout will probably not appear at the top of the list, so we need to select the layout that we want to be the primary layout.
(As you can see from my list, my custom layout is at the top. I did some hacky stuff a couple of years ago to achieve this and I honestly can't remember how, but it definitely involved tweaking the registry. I don't recommend that at all. I think that just setting it as the override in this settings panel should be fine.)
17. Finally, you probably have to log out and in again, or perhaps even reboot.
You may need to fiddle with Windows's settings a bunch of times before it will stick.
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Honestly, Windows's handling of custom keyboard layouts is a nightmare. If you need to uninstall it, that can sometimes be a headache too.
I'll try to outline the steps here...
Uninstallating the layout
1. Run the setup.exe file again, and choose "Remove the keyboard layout." Then click Finish. Seems simple enough, and sometimes that does the trick!
If that, for some reason, didn't work, you'll have to go another route.
2. Open Programs and Features in the traditional Control Panel. You can get to it quickly by pasting this address into the address bar of a file explorer window:
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Programs and Features
3. Sort the list by the "Installed On" column to show the most recent at the top. If the keyboard layout really hasn't uninstalled, you will see it at the top of the list.
(Please excuse the appearance of this screenshot, Windows's dark mode is buggy.)
4. Click Uninstall at the top of the list. That should be all there is to it.
The reason that I strongly recommend including a version number in the layout name is because sometimes the layout uninstaller leaves remnants in the registry. Installing future versions of a layout with the same name is often impossible, even if you have uninstalled the previous layout completely. I had to trawl though my registry to clean out all traces of the original layout name. Like I said, Windows does not handle custom keyboard layouts well, at all!
Ok I hope that guide is detailed enough!
Let me know if there's any other issues. There doesn't seem to be much information or guidance on the web about how to use this application. I guess that not many people in the world really care about custom keyboard layouts:)
