Imagine you are disabled and only have the use of one finger.
How do you press “Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V”?
Stickykeys allows you to use your one functioning finger to press Ctrl then release it, then press C and release it, and you’ll have done the equivalent of pressing both at the same time.
TIL what sticky keys is used for
I use it to mine continuously in Minecraft without having to hold the mouse button myself.
Turning off that shit is one of the first things I do on a fresh install.
Turning off sticky keys is one of the first things I do after accidentally activating it during a raid and wiping the team.
The problem is that I always forget about it, until it inevitably triggers.
It’s soooooooo easy to disable. The pop up for it even tells you how!
Sticky keys and the windows key I always immediately disable.
The windows key is so super useful though. Not just for quickly starting or finding shit without using the mouse, but also for moving windows around, maximizing them, making them take up exactly half of your screen, locking your screen, etc.
I am very confused why anyone would disable the super/command key. Ever since moving to linux its become the most used key on my entire board.
Admittedly i am using a shortcut heavy tillable win manager. Blown away how fun it is to operate a pc keyboard only. (Overspendinging on nice keyboard switches also helps)
The Windows key as part of a combination is great. It’s an extra modifier key.
The Windows key by itself is terrible because it immediately steals focus from the current application and can’t be disabled without something like AutoHotkey.
Its stupid that it can’t be easily disabled in the OS but it’s intended usage is not terrible I think.
I think it’s extremely badly designed. A single keypress – especially if the key is in such an easily reachable position – shouldn’t steal focus. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a game or in Visual Studio, it’s disruptive.
This behavior would make sense as a media key somewhere near the F-keys. But as the default action on a modifier key it’s just bad design.
I can’t believe that launching the start menu is an action on par with opening an application menu or typing a capital letter.
The start menu is definitely one of the most used things in my OS, personally, so I think it should be easily reachable. Opening the start menu and just typing the beginning of the name of a software, and hitting enter to launch it is pretty handy, imo. It also makes sense to me that it steals focus, especially in office programs, or visual studio, otherwise the shortcut wouldn’t make much sense in the first place. In that context, all it takes to return focus to the window you last used, is to press the same key again.
The only reason I understand why it’s disruptive is fullscreen games or other apps that take a while to unfocus, which is not really much of an issue anymore with modern hardware and borderless windowed “fullscreen” apps. I think a good solution would be to just disable that shortcut while a true fullscreen app is focused.
Maybe I have a different view on this because I barely ever accidentally press it in the first place.
I agree that it should be easily reachable. Just not through one single keypress. macOS’s Spotlight serves a similar purpose and is reachable via Cmd + Space (with the Cmd key being right next to the space bar). That’s just as easy to do as hitting one button but is extremely unlikely to happen by accident.
I personally use the start menu mainly for shutting down the computer as all commonly used programs are pinned to the task bar. A shortcut that opens it has no value to me as opposed to e.g. one that shows or hides a terminal window or one that mutes/unmutes me in Teams even when it’s in the background.
And I do consider it disruptive because having the start menu unexpectedly pop open and swallow several keypresses (and in the worst case launching some application I didn’t want to run) takes my attention away from what I was doing and forces it into something completely irrelevant. If this pulls me out of deep focus I can lose the equivalent of ten minutes of work due to one keypress.
The core of the problem is that this behavior is very annoying for people who don’t use the start menu all the time and there’s no way to change it. If it was just a default for a rebindable shortcut then it’d be a minor hassle once and nobody would complain. But the way it is it feels like Microsoft is trying to force-feed me the start menu, workflow be damned.
