It's possible to change the key bindings (accelerator keys, hot keys, whatever you want to call them) used by ECMLink. For example, if F12 is not a good hot key for you to use to start a new log, you can change that to be Ctrl-L or maybe even just the S key by itself!

An outline of the basic process is provided below with more details to follow.

1. Locate the installed default property files
2. Copy these into your local home directory
3. Edit local copy

NOTE: Make sure you have installed at least version 3.24.70 off our downloads page first before you proceed.

Default files will be installed with each new version of ECMLink. You should not edit these directly because they will be blindly replaced by future releases. But you do need to start with a copy of these because they define all the editable stuff.

The location of these files will be in your ECMLink application install directory. Under Windows, this will typically be one of these two places.

32-bit Windows:

C:\Program Files\ECMLink\

64-bit Windows:

C:\Program Files (x86)\ECMLink\

In that directory, you'll find the following two directories.

resources\com\ecmtuning\ecmlink\view\ecmlink\
resources\com\ecmtuning\ecmlink\view\main\

These two directories each contain a file named Action.properties. You're going to copy (and rename) these two Action.properties files as your new starting files in your local home directory.

Locate your user home directory for ECMLink data files. Under Windows, this will be:

Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ecmlink\

Windows Vista/7:

C:\Users\<username>\ecmlink\

Locate the same directories under here as you found under the program files.

resources\com\ecmtuning\ecmlink\view\ecmlink\
resources\com\ecmtuning\ecmlink\view\main\

Now copy each Action.properties from your ECMLink install directory into the corresponding directory in your user home directory.

Once you've done that, rename each Action.properties file that you just copied into your user home directory to be Action_en.properties instead. This will let you edit your local home copy and remove everything you don't care about while picking up default values from the original Action.properties file in your install directory.

LANGUAGES NOTE: If you have your base Windows language local set to something other than US English, you may need to name that “_en” part differently. To know, open up the ECMLink application and go into the Help→About dialog then click on the System tab and scroll down to user.language. If that says something other than “en”, use that value instead of “en” in the Action_en.properties filename. Common alternatives are Action_fr.properties (french), Action_es.properties (spanish), etc.

Now that you have a localized copy in your home directory that won't get blown away when you upgrade ECMLink, you can edit this file at will. Open it up in Wordpad (don't use Notepad as it doesn't like the file format!) and change whatever you want.

For example, if you open the Action_en.properties file in the view\ecmlink directory, you'll see the following line.

ecmlinkConnect.accelerator = F2

That defines the quick-key for “connect” to be F2. If you want to use Ctrl-C instead, just change that to be:

ecmlinkConnect.accelerator = ctrl C

The exact syntax for these accelerators is given below (if you're really brave).

<modifiers>* (<typedID> | <pressedReleasedID>)

modifiers := shift | control | ctrl | meta | alt | button1 | button2 | button3

typedID := typed <typedKey>
typedKey := string of length 1 giving Unicode character.
pressedReleasedID := (pressed | released) key
key := KeyEvent key code name, i.e. the name following "VK_".

Examples are in the Action.properties files. Stuff like “ctrl L” works and “END” or “PAGE_UP” or “PAGE_DOWN”, etc. Refer to this page for more examples.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/awt/event/KeyEvent.html

When you see something like “VK_PASTE”, you can use the “PASTE” portion as your accelerator name. Just drop the VK_ prefix.