Last year I started learning Hawaiian in an effort to improve my understanding of the music that I love. I found that I wasn’t satisfied with the available tools for typing the ʻokina and kahakōs used in the Hawaiian language.
At first I wrote a little AutoHotKey script to make it easier, and it works, but AutoHotKey is kind of a heavy tool for so simple a use case.
This year I set about writing a simple Windows app that gave the same result: global hotkeys to quickly type ʻokinas and kahakōs. It mean learning some old-school Windows coding around creating hot keys and simulating the keyboard, but the result is a simple .NET 2.0 WinForms app called HawKeys. It works great, and even better, HawKeys is my first app published on the Microsoft Store!
So if you’re on Windows 10, get HawKeys on the Microsoft Store. Otherwise. if you’re on Windows XP SP3 or greater, go to Latest HawKeys Release, download the zip file and run HawKeys.exe.
You can follow the development at HawKeys on GitHub.
Enjoy!
/jon
Jon Thysell 