You should now be able to click the key 1 on your second keyboard and see notepad opening.

You might have wanted to improve your workflow on your computer if so you might have looked at getting some sort of secondary keyboard, maybe a Streamdeck to automate some of those more repetitive tasks on your computer, but a product like the Streamdeck is 150 dollars on amazon (At the time of writing this).

What if I told you that you could make any old Keyboard or Numpad into a fully customizable Macro keyboard.

No additional hardware needed (Other than a keyboard of cause), and only for the cost of the Keyboard.

All you need is a little bit of coding knowledge, a bit of patience and a keyboard.

CREDITS I did not myself come up with this method of setting up a second keyboard for macros.

TaranVH2nd-keyboard The Art of the Bodge: How I Made The Emoji Keyboard I modified their ideas and code to work for my liking.

Best Keyboard Ros Download Step 1

Supplies: A keyboard Add Tip Ask Question Comment Download Step 1: Install the Necessary Programs You might know that if you plug 2 keyboards into windows, windows wont be able to distinguish between them, therefore we have to get a little creative.

Best Keyboard Ros Software Named LuaMacros

LuaMacros - Download To distinguish between the 2 keyboards we will be using a piece of software named LuaMacros.

LuaMacros was made for building flight simulators and can, therefore, differentiate between many keyboards.

Autohotkey - Download To set up the macros that will make your life easier we will be using Autohotkey.

The code from my GitHub repository - Download You will find all the files needed in this project on my GitHub page.

It helps to know where you save the folder you get when you click download on GitHub as It will help you later.

Add Tip Ask Question Comment Download Step 2: Get You Keyboard ID Even though Windows cant differentiate between keyboards each keyboard does have an ID.

We will need this ID to tell LuaMacros which keyboard is our MACRO keyboard.

To find this ID open Luamacros and open the file Getkeycodes.lua -The file will be in the folder you downloaded from GitHub When you have opened the file click the little blue triangle in the top to run the program.

You will be asked to press a button on the keyboard you wish to turn into a MACRO keyboard The program will then output a list of all connected devices.

Something like what you see in the images above: In my case, you can see I have two devices connected.

MACROS is the device you just identified by pressing a key on your secondary keyboard.

To the right of MACROS, we have a long string, This is a combination of the device type and id.

My secondary keyboard has the id: PID0745 you find the id between the 2 first.

Add Tip Ask Question Comment Download Step 4: Try It Out You should now be all set up and ready to run both the LuaMacros file and the Autohotkey file.

To do this first open the file 2ndkeyboard.lua in LuaMacros and click the little blue triangle.

Now right-click the file Main.ahk in file explorer and click run script.

Best Keyboard For Macros