Comment by mrandish
10 days ago
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently.
They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
I agree. Making deals with laptop manufacturers to put their trademark on keyboards is an unhealthy-for-society abuse of their market power and should be treated as such in every jurisdiction that they trade in.
However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently. It shows up in the PowerToys keyboard remapper tool as an F23 key. (Yes, there are more than 12 F key codes! I believe there is 24 in Windows.)
Other OSes will not even be able to say things like "Press your Copilot key to open FEDORA SEARCH" or whatever without being cease'n'desisted to high heaven.
Terrible.
> However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently.
That's probably because you're not using it as a modifier so the OP's complaint of the automatic key-up event doesn't impact you (it's not necessary to have a keep-pressed state in this type of use).
Correct. Further down thread I wrote to another poster a summary of what's really happening now when you remap the CoPilot key - copied here...
The CoPilot key is really sending: Shift+Alt+Win+Ctrl+F23 which Windows now uses as the shortcut to run the CoPilot application. When you remap the CoPilot key to right-Ctrl only the F23 is being remapped to right-Ctrl. Due to the way Windows works and because MSFT is now sending F23 DOWN and then F23 UP when the CoPilot key has only been pressed Down but not yet released, those other modifiers remain pressed down when our remapped key is sent. I don't know if this was intentional on MSFT's part to break full remapping or if it's a bug. Either way, it's certainly non-standard and completely unnecessary. It would still work for calling the CoPilot app to wait for the CoPilot key to be released to send the F23 KEY UP event. That's the standard method and would allow full remapping of the key.
But instead, when you press CoPilot after remapping it to Right-Ctrl... the keys actually being sent are: Shift+Alt+Win+Right-Ctrl (there are also some other keypresses in there that are masked). If your use case doesn't care that Shift, Alt and Win are also pressed with Right-Ctrl then it'll seem fine - but it isn't. Your CoPilot key remapped to Right-Ctrl no longer works like it did before or like Left-Ctrl still works (sending no other modifiers). Unfortunately, a lot of shortcuts (including several common Windows desktop shortcuts) involve Ctrl in combination with other modifiers. Those shortcuts still work with Left-Ctrl but not CoPilot remapped to Right-Ctrl. And there's no way to fix it with remapping (whether AutoHotKey, PowerToys, Registry Key, etc). It might be possible to fix it with a service running below the level of Windows with full admin control which intercepts the generated keys before Windows ever sees them - but as far as I know, no one has succeeded in creating that.
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Remapping right control works fine for me on win11
It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.
It seems to work fine in vscode setting custom keybinds at least.
I havent tried it anywhere else to be fair
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I did not know that - what an unpleasant choice.
I am not sure how terrible that number is. They probably have many users with only very limited activity or users that simply do not need AI for the workflows they are doing. Intuitively, I would expect the number of users that actually have some use for AI to be in single digits.