Projects/HuhuKey

huhuKey: a lesson to shareware everywhere.

A couple weeks ago I was in need of a utility to set up some hotkeys, and a friend recommended Stardock's Keyboard Launchpad. I bought it for a modest $10 and used it for a couple days only to find myself feeling cheated out of my money. The application barely did anything and it probably gets hundreds of sales a year. I thought "I could write this in a weekend!"

And I did. Hopefully it'll save a couple people their hard-earned $10.

Here's a rundown of its features:

• Bad-ass icon with alpha transparency
• Full Unicode support (for what it's worth!)
• Saves configuration in human-readable UTF-8 XML
• No install required, and fully "portable" configuration for use on portable drives
• Supports multiple actions per hotkey
• Can run programs, open folders and URLs
• Customizable hotkeys for showing and shutting down the program
• It's not only free, but open source too

Here's a rundown of its limitations:

• It doesn't do a whole lot except run programs.
• Doesn't run on anything earlier than Windows XP (it's 2006, people)

You can download a binary here:

You can get the source code here:

Note: the source code is probably more up-to-date than the binary. You need Visual Studio (at least 2003) and WTL to build it.