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About Igor's Keys

Igor's Keys is a small Windows tray program that gives the extra keys of the CHERRY CyMotion Master XPress keyboard (model G86-21050, part numbers such as G86-21050PLAAAA and G86-21050SLAAAA, USB id 046A:0023) a job again. It is made for that one keyboard and ignores every other device. Cherry's original KeyM@n software was discontinued and its kernel driver does not install on current Windows, which left the ten side keys and the Eject key dead.

It was written for my father, Igor, so that his keyboard does everything it used to again. Hence the name.

Unofficial: not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Cherry. CHERRY, CyMotion and KeyM@n are trademarks of their respective owners.

How it works

  • The keyboard exposes its extra keys on a separate USB HID interface (usage page 0x0C "Consumer Control"). Its report descriptor declares a maximum usage of 0x023C, but the side keys send 0x0279 and 0x0301–0x0303, which the Windows HID parser discards; the remaining side keys (scroll up/down, cut, copy, paste, undo) are in range but have no Windows function.
  • Igor's Keys registers for that interface with the Raw Input API (RegisterRawInputDevices, RIDEV_INPUTSINK) and receives every report as raw bytes, including the ones the parser would drop. It matches the three-byte press report against a table captured from the real keyboard (keys.json) and runs the assigned action.
  • Actions are executed with SendInput (Unicode text, key combinations) and ShellExecute (programs, files, folders, web addresses). The normal keyboard interface is never touched.
  • The old KeyM@n configuration (.csf) is a Microsoft MFC CArchive serialization keyed by PS/2 scan codes; the mapping from those codes to the USB usages was extracted from Cherry's filter driver Ch64USB.sys.

The full discovery write-up and the capture tools are in discovery/ (start with FINDINGS.md).

Built with

Python 3.13, ctypes (Win32 APIs), pystray and Pillow (tray icon), tkinter (editor), PyInstaller (stand-alone folder). No other runtime dependencies.

Acknowledgements

The Linux kernel's hid-cherry driver documented the descriptor bug and the 0x0301–0x0303 usages years ago. The rest was measured on the keyboard itself.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.