article_en.txt

Windows keyboard layout, reverse engineered with fasm
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I have reverse engineered the Windows keyboard layout format, found in files
C:\Windows\System32\kbd*.dll. 

Initially I wanted to add easy typing of symbols like —, á, ∞ but then decided
to get as much usability as I can from the layouts. 

The result? Layout that can switch between English and Russian keyboard with
Caps Lock, globally across all applications, showing current language with
Caps Lock LED, and with ability to type a whole bunch of additional symbols. 

As well as keyboard layout format described in flat assembler source. 
And for extra fun, a disassembler that turns a layout dll into source file. 

With this, you can freely customize and improve your Windows keyboard layouts! 

Published as public domain on https://github.com/grompe/kbdasm 

The keyboard layout source found in kbdusru_undead.asm has all structures of
the layout format mapped, makes use of UTF-8, and is hopefully more-or-less
understandable for customizing. Even if you're not bilingual you can benefit
from being able to type Unicode symbols easily. 

The disassembler found in diskbd.bat is full of tricks to make fasm read a
binary format and produce a text file. I had to write several macros to make
it work.