AutoHotkey Community

I updated to AHK_L yesterday, and have reworked my main script as UTF-8 (I use BabelPad for editing). The install is fresh, following a manual wiping of all AHK-related registry keys, folders and files, and the system has been rebooted several times since.

One very strange side-effect of the change, at least on my system (XP), is that hotkey combos that include CTRL no longer work in some but not in all applications. Affected applications include BabelPad, OpenOffice and Firefox 4. Unaffected applications include NoteTab Pro, Atlantis (word processor), Archivarius, even Netscape 4.8!

This has been tested with the simplest of scripts, containing nothing more than this:



Which should give you a bullet when you type CTRL+SHIFT+B. In BabelPad, OpenOffice and Firefox 4 however, it either does nothing, or does whatever CTRL+SHIFT+B has been defined to do by the program itself (i.e. set the input language to Tibetan in BabelPad, or trigger subscript in OpenOffice)...

It looks like the affected programs are overriding AHK. Any ideas?

That's a bug. AutoHotkey_L sends any characters which have no corresponding keystrokes using SendInput() instead of the old Alt+Numpad method, which was slower and didn't properly support Unicode. Normally when you send a keystroke, the modifier key-states are adjusted automatically (by sending key-up/down events) to put them in the desired state. However, it looks like this isn't being done for special characters, so the Ctrl and Shift keys are left in the "pressed" state when • is sent. Some applications ignore the modifier keys and just output the character as intended.

There are two possible workarounds:

Shift is left in the pressed state since it doesn't appear to cause any problems (in Firefox 4).

Thanks for the confirmation, Lexikos, and especially the workarounds.

Thanks for the bug report. v1.1.00.01 should solve the problem.