Uosk

Formerly known as Charmappino, Uosk (Unicode On-Screen Keyboard) is a practical piece of software that you can use to build your own map of special characters, long or commonly used words which can be quickly inserted into any text-oriented application by just clicking a button.

This type of tool is similar to a virtual keyboard or a character map, with the main difference being that you can not only customize it by adding your own characters but also entire words. It supports ASCII, ANSI, UTF-8 and UTF-16.

There are no software requirements involved for this utility to work properly. It gets installed swiftly and launches a simple window that always stay on top of other programs, so that you can easily insert text snippets into any environment.

As soon as you click a button in this window, Uosk inserts the containing text at the mouse cursor's current position. From the "File" menu, you can activate "Edit" mode to turn this panel into an editable area, delete what's displayed here, and type or paste your own special characters, long or frequently used words.

The application acts like a clipboard history tool in some way, giving you the possibility of rapidly pasting any frequently used word or phrase, instead of copying it from another source. The installed directory contains text documents with the Greek, Hiragana and Russian alphabet, along with Latin characters.

The map can be saved as a plain text document for future sessions. You can open any TXT file to use its words, ask the program to auto-copy the text snippet as soon as you insert it somewhere, and display a status bar with the total characters of any selected snippet.

The font of the buttons and editor can be personalized when it comes to the type, style, size and script. Moreover, you can specify the characters (indicators) that will break text into distinct snippets when opening plain text documents to use contents.

The software program worked smoothly on Windows in our tests and had minimal impact on the computer's performance. We don't usually come across tools that bring something new to the table but we think that Uosk is one of those.

It can become invaluable to users who frequently work with text editors, helping them boost productivity. The application is currently in alpha development stage, and we're looking forward to new features.