The new Microsoftslop copilot key always sends the following key-sequence when pressed:

copilot key down: left-shift-down left-meta-down f23-down f23-up left-meta-up left-shift-up
copilot key up: <null>

This means there’s no real key-up event when you release the key --> it can’t be used (properly) as a modifier like ctrl or alt.

The workaround is to send a pretend key-up event after a time delay, but then you mustn’t be too slow / fast when pressing a shortcut.

tldr: AI took a perfectly working modifier key from you.

— edit —
Some keyboards apparently do the “right” thing and don’t send the whole sequence at once, you can remap those properly with keyd, see: https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd/issues/1025#issuecomment-2971556563 / https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd/issues/825

copilot key down: left-shift-down left-meta-down f23-down
copilot key up: f23-up left-meta-up left-shift-up

this will still break left-shift + remapped copilot and left-meta + remapped copilot, but RCtrl remaps should work as expected

  • SUDO@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Didn’t KDE say they were working on a way to remap it in a future update?

    • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      It is shocking difficult to buy a new laptop without one. Yes, I know about Framework, System 76, etc, but go to your local big box store and every laptop is covered in either Microsoft logos or Apple logos.

      • BorgDrone@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        MacBooks are frikkin amazing though. There is nothing in the PC world that even comes close.

        • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          Yup, they’re ‘frikkin’ amazing at locking you in. Microslop is just chasing that with OEMs, and doing a great fucking job too.

          Now, is this every single make of laptop out there allowing this at the hardware level? How are they doing it? MoBo firmware? BIOS?

          • BorgDrone@feddit.nlEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Locking me in to what and how? It’s a laptop, a tool, not a religion. I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit as long as the OS gets out of the way, stuff just works and I can get on with my job.

        • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          Yeah, no. I have to use a MacBook at work and there is nothing it does well that an equivalently-priced laptop from any other major PC manufacturer doesn’t do better. Performance is good, but not great, and, again, is trounced by most of its equivalents, even the Surface Book. Window management in MacOS is appalling, the built in applications range from adequate to basically unusably bad (looking at you, Safari) and every bit of it seems to have been designed to be different first and better second.

          • Creegz@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            A lot of the “different first” has to do with Microsoft patenting UI elements, methodologies and design choices. I’ve never understood why people trash Apple computers so vehemently. They’re a fairly robust software suite targeted at consumers and amateur creatives that’s tailor made to run on the hardware it ships with, if you don’t use those things that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad.

            I’ve had laptops from almost every major manufacturer and frankly the MacBooks I’ve had stood out save for a few niche problems like dock compatibility. The only manufacturer that regularly comes even remotely close is Lenovo. My work provided dell is 4 years old, cost the same as than an equivalent Mac at the time and is trash. I get 90 minutes out of the battery if I’m lucky, trackpad feels horrible and is inaccurate, can’t do gestures reliably and is horribly unintuitive (must click on the bottom left corner to get a left click despite the whole thing being clickable (tapping works about half the time) but it’s placed so far left i think it’s made for left handed people), case is warped because the battery swelled and had to be replaced after 2 months, it bitches about the charger it was shipped with saying it’s underpowered, the screen has bleeding on many pixel clusters. Why was that thing listed so high when the Mac we bought another user at the same price still works and has only had a problem with cheap dock compatibility? Oh because it said i7, had an ssd (which failed), a “multi-touch/gesture capable” trackpad. and a numpad. This has been the general quality of 4/5 of work provided laptops, 3 were Dell, one was HP, the only good one was a Lenovo. All were business targeted models with not too dissimilar pricing from a MacBook. I als deploy a lot of machines, mostly laptops, and honestly the only ones that do not come half functional out of the box or need warranty in less than a year are Apple and Lenovo.

              • Creegz@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                5 months ago

                Yes but a lot of the things that frustrate people coming from Windows to Mac are because a Microsoft patented functionality to Windows that Apple had back in the 90’s.

          • BorgDrone@feddit.nlEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Performance is good, but not great, and, again, is trounced by most of its equivalents, even the Surface Book.

            Sure, you can find an equivalent priced laptop that will beat the MBPro at one metric, but it’ll fall short on others. It’s faster but it has a cheap case , crappy trackpad, shit screen or terrible battery life, etc.

            There are very few laptops out there that are as good in every metric as a MBPro. It is simply the best total package.

          • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.comEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Yeah, my complaints about Apple all stem from the fact that my industry has a standard program that only runs on Macs… And every Mac I’ve used has inevitably ended up taking 4x as long to do basically anything else when compared to Windows or Linux. The only reason I ever use a Mac is because my job requires it, and even then it is only begrudgingly; if there was a way to run the program on anything else, I would have done so a long time ago.

            And yeah, I agree 100% about the “different first, better second” design choices. Lots of the most frustrating things about Macs are due to intentional design choices that Apple makes. Not because it is better for the user, but simply because it is different.

  • kamen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I’m all for hardware remappable keyboards in laptops too - just like what you can have with an external one. I do realise though that this is a niche within a niche. From what I know only Framework (oh, and System76) is doing something like that.

  • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    An embarrassing new low, even with the bars they’ve already set. And fitting, for this being the (egregiously multiply-) branded button to launch the shit show. Christ, this has been a fucking carnival lmao.

    Microslop has now regressed to implementing “features” very closely resembling - in sophistication and effect - my own bumbling, desperate, ignorant attempts at similar (“making a button behave like a macro”), using AutoHotKey, somewhere between 15-20 years ago.

    And do I understand that they both shipped that, on hardware, AND it’s broken so badly it can’t be easily remedied?

    I don’t know what to say. It’s like all the geniuses of comedy who died too young are doing this, all of it.

    (No shade whatsoever to AHK, it was, probably still is, awesome at its job!)

    Edit: suddenly realized it’s just on purpose, probably. Anyway, rant remains lol

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Not really, it sends a combination of 3 really fast button combination on press and doesn’t report to the os when your finger releases the key. You need to run a daemon that detects that specific combination and emulates a finger release after a specified time

      Assholes. Couldn’t they just remap one of the useless “internet” keys from the 00s like KEY_HOMEPAGE or XF86Mail??

      Or create a brand new scancode since they could change the kernel without any problem, especially because the manufacturers would need to change the keyboard firmware anyway AND because copilot requires special hardware, it doesn’t need retro compatibility with older windows versions that don’t have the scancode in kernel or in the keyboard driver

      • FrChazzz@lemmus.orgEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        I have one on my Lenovo IdeaPad I bought a few months ago and am running Mint on. I remapped it to bring up the menu almost immediately. No issues. It acts like a Super key. Maybe this is a model specific thing?

        • nibbler@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          As I read it, you can’t use it as modifier as it does not ever release. So bringing up a menu directly works, but copilot+x is troublesome to map

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Did Microsoft demand vendors include such a button with those specs? If not, that sounds like a vendor issue, and I’d be looking at other vendors. Either way I’m happy to use keyboards/OSs without that “feature.”

      • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        So to be clear, this key sequence is just how windows interpret the key, the hardware is exactly the same and any other OS can still use it as the context menu key?

        Edit : oh, just saw the thing about the linux workaround. So no, they actually fucked it up on hardware level. Wow.

        • attero@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          nope, the hardware / keyboard controller sends a complete key sequence instead of a distinguishable key-up and key-down event. The OS can interpret that sequence as it sees fit, but you loose the physical key-up signal when you release the key with your finger.

          • Corngood@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            That’s insane. Even if they did this intentionally to be as difficult as possible, they locked themselves out of being able to detect long presses?

            • attero@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              I’ve made an update edit: Some hardware vendors fucked up when to send the key-up-sequence apparently so now every keyboard can behave differently. I don’t know if this makes the situation better or worse.

          • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Though any competent manufacturer, especially when talking about laptops, would still have the application key under FN (as is shown in that example image), and give the ability for users to select which one is the default function in the BIOS.

      • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        AI PC / Copilot+ label

        Okay that sounds solvable, at least. I mean, I hate it, but it seems that a person is getting what they pay for here. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully there will be plenty of non-AI PC / Copilot+ computers and keyboards.

  • texture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    happy to be typing this comment on a framework laptop, where no such key is to be found.

    interesting post, and thanks for the info. i cant believe the crap MS pulls. Linux is easier than ever. Join us.

    • attero@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      It’s arguably worse, because Samsung has full control over software, hardware, and firmware of their devices.
      Even if MS would like to fix this mess, they can’t.

      • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Theoretically I think they could redefine it as a new distinct key instead of the combo — as is done with the windows and context-menu keys. That would allow it to be remapped properly.

        • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          well that’s what they should have done but now that it’s implemented there are a lot more parties that need to come to the table to fix the mess… some hardware might not be able to fix the mess, but i’d be surprised if this shit show were implemented on hardware rather than firmware

          • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Eh, MS can just issue new requirements for their compatibility stamp, just like they did in the first place and many times previously. Newly produced laptop and keyboard models would have the fixed behavior, the same way they got the broken behavior.

            • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              new ones sure but there are a bunch of these broken machines out there now: far more than there otherwise would be, because microslop forced the upgrade for windows 11

              i guesssss if they do it soon enough the existing models will still be in their support period and they’d kinda be forced to update, assume it’s a software or firmware fix

            • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              given the complexity of doing in hardware, and the simplicity of doing it software, you’d hope yes (in which case perhaps there will be firmware hacks) but you can never truly account for the stupidity of hardware companies

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Jesus. I guess we’re going to have to start figuring out how to reverse engineer our keyboards so we can install QMK on random built-in laptop keyboards and cheap Logitech membrane keyboards to repair the damage Microsoft has done to them.

  • ColdWater@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    If this garbage is on my keyboard I will drill that motherfucker out no second thought

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I have a Lenovo usb keyboard with a fn Key in place of the Ctrl key that has absolutely no purpose. It’s for volume control like fn+F7 BUT… IT ALSO HAS DEDICATED BUTTONS FOR VOLUME CONTROL!!

      After the nth time I accidentally switched fn and Ctrl I took a screwdriver and popped it out permanently (being USB it doesn’t report fn status to the os and of course the BIOS doesn’t allow FN remapping because it’s not a laptop)

  • chraebsli@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    why even buy that slop of hardware beforehand? if you dont want that feature, you might be happier with another brands laptop