tirsdag 28. desember 2010

Assigning restricted hotkeys (with the Win key) to whatever you like in Win 7/Vista

After installing Windows 7, I suddenly found myself unable to assign Win+Space to one of my most essential tools; Launchy. Thankfully, there's a registry fix:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\DisabledHotkeys

It's a simple expandable string containing all characters for which default Win-hotkeys should be disabled (it may not already exist, in which case you'll have to create it). In my setup, it contains a single space, meaning that the system hotkey Win+Space should be unbound and ready for anyone else to use. For example, had it looked like this:

" a13"

..then Win+Space, Win+a, Win+1 and Win+3 would not be bound and made available for other use. Remember to restart you computer for the changes to apply.