Autohotkey v2 Bindings for Panasonic CF-R8

In 2016 I went for a summer in Kyoto, Japan, to learn some basics of Japanese language. That was my second summer in that country after the Echigo-Tsumari festival where I had been a volunteer. I went in low-tech mode, that is, I did not take a computer with me.

Of course, it is hard to stay for long in the country of High Technology without a computer. Quite quickly I felt the urge to program something. Therefore, I went to a little store to buy a computer.

I have always been fond of miniature computers, so I fell in love with a miniature Panasonic "Toughbook", the CF-R8. The device was 8 years old when I bought it, with a Windows Vista logo, a 1.2GHz CPU, and 4 GB of RAM. It was already short compared to 2016’s standards, and it is very low end compared to what we can have now. But I have always loved working with older machines. And also, it was dirt cheap - about €150.

The computer quickly became, for a long while, my main device. It was furbished with a Japanese Windows 7 32-bit edition, that I had painstakingly customized to English, then I had installed a Debian Linux version, and replaced the small 160GB HDD by a 1 TB HDD (the maximum on this device).

More recently I have put a 64 bit Windows 7 again on this computer to do some "retro"computing. But this time it is an English version I installed, and I stumbled upon an interesting issues : some keys of the Japanese keyboard are not used by the English keyboard. To make matters worse, some important programming keys were absent from the French mapping - such as {, }, [, ] , <, > ...

So I wrote a small AutoHotKey v2 that binds the unused keys to the keys in question.

• The key left of the spacebar, with 3 kanjis, is now used to type { [ (with shift) and < (with ctrl)
• The key right of the space bar does } ] et }
• The hiragana / katakana / romaji key simulates AltGr.
• The rightmost key with a \ , types \

If you want to customize the script, made for the AZERTY mapping, to make it more useful for the QWERTY mapping, you can download it below.