Xencelabs Quick Keys

I've never liked the remote controller that came with the Cintiq Pro 24 I  got last year. It never acted like part of the tablet, unlike the ones  built into my old Cintiq 24 HDT. You have to turn it on separately even  when it's USB connected; it shuts itself off if you don't use it  frequently enough (and you can't turn that off or change the latency  period), and I was forever forgetting what function I'd paired to which  button. Essentially the only use I had for it was varying my brush size.

Well, I've been looking on and off for a replacement for it and I  finally found one, the Xencelabs Quick Keys. (One-minute video the  company made introducing it: (https://youtu.be/6LUAa_ZXT_E).) This thing is really impressive. You can either use the Bluetooth dongle with it, or connect it by USB—where it will turn  on with either the computer, or the Cintiq if it's plugged into that.  It has a dial with a button in the middle that can be set to four  different uses (I'll be mainly using it for brush size, of course), and  eight buttons that can be set to five different sets of uses per application profile,  stepped through using a ninth button for that purpose. And you can have  as many application profiles as you like, and not just for art  programs... anything. Browsers, video editors, word processors... When  you switch between windows, it automatically detects  what program you're using and either switches to that profile or to the  "global" profile if there isn't one. But it also does something I've  never seen on such a device before... generally, you can only map one  modifier key or one keystroke combination to any button press. But this  thing will let you map strings of key press combos... for example, to  create a layer below the current layer in  Clip Studio Paint is two commands; create new layer and move layer  down... but I now have a single key that does those things in that order  with a single key press. And maybe coolest of all, it has an LED screen  up the middle that TELLS YOU WHAT EACH KEY CURRENTLY IS MAPPED TO DO, as named by you (hark, the herald angels sing!).

They put an astonishing amount of good thought into this thing, and if  I'm willing to spend some time programming the keys, I could really get a  lot of work out of this. The only caveat is that some people have had  some build quality issues (it still scores well over 4 out of 5 on  Amazon), and I was hit by that with my first one. The dial didn't  reliably size up and down; it was miscalibrated somehow and sort of just  bipped back and forth between adjacent sizes rather than going  consistently down and consistently up. So I'm returning that one today;  meanwhile, the replacement showed up Tuesday and so far it works just  fine. As long as you get one that's build right, it's a heck of a piece  of thinking. You don't even have to be a digital artist for this thing  to be a boon to you.