Shortcut Hotkey Editor

Launching applications and video games is easily done through desktop shortcuts, and takes little time. However, there are multiple methods to customize launch options, such as hotkeys for important tools. In this regard, Shortcut Hotkey Editor gives you the possibility to assign a keyboard hotkey to any shortcut on your computer.

One of the application’s main advantages is that it skips you the time and effort needed to go through a setup process, and is good to go from the moment download is done. This enables you to carry it around on a thumb drive, to configure hotkeys for more computers. What’s more, registry entries are not modified in the process.

Unfortunately, the input method of the actual hotkey is rather frustrating. In other words, the application doesn’t exactly read the key function when assigning buttons. Instead, you need to manually write down the entire expressions. A suitable example is “Ctrl+F” with every letter written down, and no space between characters.

The application lets you combine multiple special keys. Writing down the hotkey command can be done before or after you select a target shortcut. Loading a shortcut needs to be done through the browse dialog, because drag and drop is not supported. Moreover, it would have been useful to see a context menu entry for faster editing.

The location of the shortcut doesn’t necessarily have to be the desktop. Sadly, the application is strictly dedicated to INK shortcut files, with no option to load executable files. Luckily, a shortcut can be created for a web page as well.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Shortcut Hotkey Editor comes with good intentions, but is a little rough around the edges overall. Configuring the hotkey can get frustrating, while file support is limited to INK shortcut files. It’s nothing more than an alternative to the default way of assigning shortcut hotkeys from the Properties panel.