/hyperenable

Rebind ctrl+shift+alt+win (also known as Office or hyper key)

Primary LanguageC++MIT LicenseMIT

hyperenable

hyperenable allows ctrl+shift+alt+win (i.e. the Office key, or the hyper key), which is normally reserved by Windows, to be freely rebound. hyperenable does this by preemptively registering the hotkeys before explorer.exe can, and deregistering them afterwards. Run hyperenable.exe --help for cli options.

Installing

  1. Put hyperenable.exe somewhere in your system. I recommend %ProgramFiles%/hyperenable/hyperenable.exe so it can be protected by admin rights. This is important because we'll be launching it through Userinit.
  2. In Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and edit the Userinit value. Prepend (not append!) "C:\path\to\hyperenable.exe" start. This lets hyperenable.exe start before explorer.exe. Be careful with the comma delimiters. Make sure you get this right, or Windows won't start properly.
  3. Make a shortcut to hyperenable.exe and put it in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\. Right-click the shortcut and open "properties". Open the "shortcut" tab. In the "target" field, add stop. The entire "target" field should look like this: "C:\path\to\hyperenable.exe" stop.
  4. In Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\ms-officeapp\Shell\Open\Command and edit the default (unnamed) value. (If the key doesn't exist, create it.) Set the value to rundll32. You need this because, in addition to counting as a key modifier, ctrl+shift+alt+win also counts as a key press. This disables the key press.

Building

  1. Install Visual Studio 2022
  2. Install GNU Make
  3. Start Visual Studio 2022 developer prompt
  4. cd ~/project_dir
  5. make

Acknowledgements

Concept based on OfficeKeyFix.