AutoHotkey Community

[Ethan]

I wrote a script to create hotkeys for common accents and discovered the following slightly strange behavior I thought I'd bring to your attention:

The script used the winkey as the main modifier for the hotkeys. I generally find that I hit the left win key by accident, and I never use it's intended functionality (I rarely use the start menu at all, so I certainly don't need a keyboard shortcut for it), so I have the left win key disabled with a

[Chris]

That behavior is by design. Since many keyboards have 2 windows keys, defining #z (for example) makes the hotkey work with either LWin or RWin. But if you disable LWin entirely, only RWin will be available for use (assuming you have RWin on your keyboard).

But in your example, you explicitly use the disabled LWin key as a "prefix key", which causes it to become one that fires when the key is released. But since the LWin subroutine does nothing, no action occurs when the it is released, thus LWin is still disabled for all uses except hotkeys.

It's a little strange, but is documented somewhat on the Hotkeys page. Let me know if this behavior undesirable in any way (it wasn't clear from your post) or if you want to achieve some other effect.

[Ethan]

I wouldn't say the behavior in question is particularly undesirable from my point of view, just unexpected. I guess I hadn't fully understood the prefex key distinction, though now that I do a little better I can see why this should happen. What I had failed to grasp is that LWin wouldn't function as a modifier unless it's defined as a prefix key if the default functionality has been hotkeyed over to something else.