It’s an accessibility thing. If you can’t press two keys at once, then you can turn it on and press the modifier key, then the active key.
There’s also no reason for a game to inadvertently trigger it. All games should clear the
SKF_HOTKEYACTIVEflag on launch to disable the feature trigger during gameplay. Unreal, Unity, and most other engines do this by default.And that’s all fine and dandy.
If it didn’t randomly decide to turn on.It turns on when you tap shift 5 times in a row. It also has a pop up when it turns on giving you a link to the setting to turn off that behavior. Just turn it off when it happens if you aren’t going to use it.
That’s what the meme is making fun of.
You can disable this behavior too
That is actualla good feature then, if you need it for accessibility… But why on earth does it need to prompt you to enable it with such an annoying way? To my knowledge, it’s the only accessibility option that agressively advertises itself specifically when you don’t want, or need, it to.
More logical behaviour to prompt the enabling would be if a “modifier” key, and “non-modifier” key is pressed in sequence, but not at the same time. As the assumption of sticky keys is that the user is not able to press two buttons down simultaneously.
That said, it is likely that a person who has need for this feature, but is not aware of it’s excistence, would not use other modifiers than shift, as they are needed exclusively for hotkeys, which is on the far end of the learning curve (as mouse, and right klick are more apparent to learn), and if such feature is needed, it’s excistence is apparent at the time you start to use the systems via hotkeys. Instead, if you hammer shift repeatedly while typing, it indicates that you light benefit from tjis feature. Thus only requiring detection of the writing cursor being active, which is already possible, because there is an accessibility feature to highlight that. I know this, because a fresh install of windows suggests that you go trough accesdibility on first startup.
Sorry, I know you’re not developing Windows UI (but what do I know, if you did), but I kindawanted to rant a bit about such an apparent solution to a problem that has plagued from Win 3.11 at least.
As a tetraplegic person, sticky keys are my lifesaver. I can only push one button at a time on my keyboard. Thanks to sticky keys, I can write grammatically correct and use key combinations.
That’s what sticky keys is made for. Normally, it shouldn’t be active on default though, on my computers it never was. I always had to turn it on.
The shortcut to activate them is active by default and windows will display a notification when you press shift 5 times (I think) asking you about it. That happens a lot when you play some games.
Easy enough to turn off the notification though. So not sure what OP is fussing about.
For me, it’s a one time annoyance each time I setup a new computer or reformat mine. I never think about it till the shortcut triggers, and then I disable it. Not world ending, but kinda annoying, and less tech savvy won’t know or realize they can disable it despite it saying so in the popup. But I’d be more satisfied if the notice to turn it on would just pop into the notification bar instead of an interrupting popup that must be addressed to return to what you were doing. Sure, let us know about it, but don’t pull us out of what we’re doing. I in general hate any feature that interrupts your work to make you interact with it instead unless it is extremely critical, and this notification is not.
It isn’t on by default, but pressing shift I think 5 times fast in a row is a shortcut not even to turn it on, but to display a pop-up asking you if you want to turn it on.
You can disable that though. However it still seems like something that shouldn’t be happening by default, since no one is going to want to use it without knowing about it, and at that point opt-in seems better with how easy it is to do accidentally.
As someone who has had shitty laptop keyboards with fucked up keyboards. I got some actual use out of the feature throughout the years and I have to say it’s quite nice.
I can’t remember the last time I had a sticky keys issue.
However, Win10 randomly deciding to background/minimize my game for absolutely no reason is definitely a thing. Nothing like having to alt-tab back into your game to find yourself dead when you stopped moving in the middle of a firefight.
Never happens to me, but I also have a keyboard that let’s you deactivate the Windows and Tab keys. I have them deactivated at all times and alt+tab on my second keyboard.
Tell me OP is 14 years old without telling me OP is 14 years old.
14 or 64.
Would you like to enable sticky keys?
Gah, no! I’m never going to want to. Stop asking.
Hope you never get arthritis when you’re old.
Me too
A similar thing I’ve run into where a feature that usually wouldn’t get activated much gets in the way because of games making you input weird patterns is the Windows language swap hotkey, alt-shift. I play a game that uses alt and shift a lot, and involves quite a bit of typing, so I kept getting confused why my language was suddenly different. Took me ages to find out why.
Yeah, it’s annoying. I use Dvorak but some games don’t detect that (a lot of respect to those that do detect it because my qwerty typing isn’t very efficient anymore, if I do need to type in addition to game input) and it’s easier to switch to qwerty than rebind everything, so I don’t want to disable it.
Though if you don’t use the other languages, you can remove them from your list. Do a search to find it, MS likes to move this option around so I don’t know offhand where it is right now, but if you only have one language/layout, the key combo does nothing. You can also change the hotkeys.
I need the other languages, instead I disabled the hotkey to swap.
