Escaping From A Shift; Changing The Shift Buttons And The Optional Nature Of X-Shift; Adding Further Actions To The Shift Keys - One for All EXTENDER A1 FOR URC-7780 Instructions Manual

7.4 Escaping from a Shift

Suppose you have pressed Magic but then want to cancel it, you have pressed Brightness+ and want to
access Channel+/− before the T-Shift timeout, or your finger has slipped and you are not sure whether or
not you have pressed Magic. In the unextended remote there is nothing you can do about this. Repeated
keypresses of Magic have the same effect as a single one except for the special treatment of digit keys for
EFC entry. In the extender, just press the Light/ESC key. This cancels any Shift, X-Shift or T-Shift and,
if any of these were set, the LED flashes twice to indicate the cancellation and the keypress has no effect
on the backlight. If there was nothing to cancel, no harm is done as it just acts as the normal Light key –
but more on that below as the extender 'corrects' the action of the Light key.

7.5 Changing the Shift buttons and the optional nature of X-Shift

Although the button that provides the Shift action is by default Magic, and the one that provides X-Shift
is Shift/Magic, these can be changed with IR.exe. In the Other Settings panel of the General tab there are
entries for Shift Key (default 2) and Alt Shift Key (default 130, = $82). These can be changed to the
keycodes for any other desired keys – a table of keycodes is given in the Appendix. There is also an entry
for Alt Shift, which can be chosen to be either XShift or Shift. If you change Alt Shift value to Shift then
the Shift and Alt Shift keys will have the same effect. If Shift Key and Alt Shift Key are left at their
defaults and Alt Shift changed to Shift then repeated keypresses of Magic will have the same effect as a
single keypress, as the first press makes the second press be of the Alt Shift Key, but this just has Shift
action so the second, and any further, presses will again be of the Alt Shift Key and have a Shift action.
If, however, you leave Shift Key and Alt Shift at their defaults and change Alt Shift Key to 2 (same as
Shift Key), then repeated keypresses of Magic will toggle Shift on and off as the second press will be of
Shift/Magic which no longer has an assigned action but, like any other key, its pressing cancels the Shift
action. There are therefore two ways of turning off the ability to access X-Shift from physical buttons,
one giving repeated keypresses of Magic always acting as Shift and the other giving repeated keypresses a
toggle action.
Why should one want to turn off X-Shift access from the physical buttons? I do so to provide many more
'phantom' keys to which I can assign special protocol functions to use in macros. A phantom key is one
to which one can bind a function but which has no direct access from the physical buttons. The extender
provides three phantom keys that appear simply as Phantom1, Phantom2 and Phantom3 within IR.exe
lists. With Shift and X-Shift these provide nine such keys, but I do not find that to be enough. A
phantom key is effectively a name for a subroutine and its inclusion in a macro is a call to that subroutine.
The combination of special protocols and phantom keys enables the construction of very powerful
macros, as illustrated in section 10.9. In any case I find it annoying to have to make three keypresses to
access the third function on a key. Instead, when I want three functions I use the Long Keypress special
protocol. My three functions are then accessed through a short keypress, a long keypress and (singly)
shifted keypress.

7.6 Adding further actions to the Shift keys

Whatever button assignments are made to provide Shift and X-Shift actions, after they have set their shift
action these buttons are then passed through for normal processing so that macros can be bound to them.
The shift key could, for example, be made also to set a ToadTog toggle. As will be seen in the section on
the ToadTog special protocol, this can be used to emulate X-Shift on one or more particular keys when X-
Shift access from the physical buttons has been turned off.
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