The Art of the Bodge: How I Made The Emoji Keyboard

Reminds me of Tom Scott's "Art of Bodge up" video where he attempts to make an emoji keyboard on Windows. ▶ this video It's funny at the end he says "and don't ever suggest me I use Linux, just don't." I felt he expected it to be really hard project on Linux, while iterally his project is a single keyboard layout file.

I can't disagree, even if I would prefer something else. Easily the most compelling argument I've heard for Windows is Tom Scott's: ▶ this video .

Auto Hotkey is surprisingly powerful Here's Tom Scott talking about how he used AHK and Lua to make a keyboard for every emoji ▶ this video

Never underestimate the art of the bodge, it's quite literally keeping the world ticking over, perfection has a place but it is rare and fleeting. I saw a good talk on it from Tom Scott some time ago[0] which I think is relevant. [0]: ▶ this video

Fun AutoHotKey abuse: Tom Scott's emoji keyboard[0]. It's every single emoji (at the time of recording) on 14 full keyboards with 1,000s of hand-placed bespoke stickers. He goes into more detail here[1], but it's beautiful. [0]: link [1]: ▶ this video

AutoHotKey (in addition to WSL and VS Code) was enough to make me Windows-curious and eventually try a Windows laptop again after 10+ years on Mac. I first found out about AHK via Tom Scott's similar ode here: ▶ this video He describes it as “a bodge that helps you make other bodges”, which is beautifully put. [For those outside the UK, a “bodge” is a clumsy hack or repair.]

Yes, there is the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which is a compatibility layer for running Linux binaries natively on Windows: link link link I haven't switched to Windows 10 full-time yet, but WSL works remarkably well whenever I've tried it. Cmder ( link ) and ConEmu ( link ) are pretty decent terminal emulators and Terminus ( link ) looks promising too. (It's hard to beat iTerm, though.) My other concern with Windows 10 was security and viruses. Last time I used Windows every day (~1999!) that was a huge concern, but it seems to be less of one now. Most seem to consider using the standard Windows-supplied virus checker just fine if you're not torrenting dodgy stuff and opening strange email attachments. The following guide (from the @SwiftOnSecurity twitter author) was helpful: link It contains much the same advice for Windows that you'd expect to see for keeping macOS secure too — keep stuff up-to-date, encrypt your drives, don't try to disable User Account Control or Device Guard (like Gatekeeper on Mac). I've found that chocolatey ( link ) is a great replacement for brew, Laragon ( link ) is a good alternative to Valet, and Autohotkey ( link ) is unrivaled for general system automation. (See Tom Scott waxing lyrical about Windows and AHK here: ▶ this video ).

With lua + autohotkey scripts in windows this is definitely possible the last time I checked. You run a luascript on another keyboard mapped to a generic key, luascript inputs that as the proper text-based language There's a tomscott video on it ▶ this video Checkout Teran van Hemert (linustechtips editor) for some potential ideas too. He's got crazy macro schemas, I've used a couple of his and there great. All windows based as well though. link Mac, I can only assume its something you would write in applescript. But maybe you find some interesting ideas there. I found something called " link that might be of interest to you