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.
It would be nice if the default wasn’t being on, or it asked during installation or something.
This is a rare case of an accessibility feature often being someone’s roadblock…
It asks when you do it the first time lol, although asking at installation might be a better idea
Eh, many people use computers but are not the ones who installed the operating system (e.g. work, school, library, etc.). I think it’s likely more accessible to be able to enable the feature at any time, if needed. In my experience pressing shift five times generally only happens to me when playing games. I don’t know how often it pops with normal web browsing, email, etc.
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 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.
Sticky keys is it so that when you press the modifier keys (control, shift, alt/option and win/meta/super/command), you won’t need to hold them in order to activate a keyboard shortcut.
It’s an accessibility feature designed to make it easier for people who may have trouble using a keyboard to activate keyboard shortcuts.
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.
The thing about accessibility features is that they need to be accessible.
It is much easier for a regular person to disable them than for a disabled or old person to enable them.
Fun fact: A common way to get access to SYSTEM (higher than admin) privileges on Windows is the sethc exploit, where you replace sethc (the program that shows the sticky keys dialog) with command prompt, and it gets started as SYSTEM, the only thing needed is write access to System32, which can either be from an admin account or by editing the file system externally. This also allows opening a command prompt on the login screen, allowing some cursed things, like if you start explorer.exe on the login screen it combines the desktop and login screen.
I used to do this to make a hidden account on my computer to bypass my parents’ screen time restrictions
I did this in college with windows 7. I don’t think it works on 10, but could be mistaken.
I helped an elderly man get back into his pc doing a variation of this.
Changed the accessibility magnifier function to comman prompt. Was able to log in and create another user account after he lost access to a password.
So not sure about that one specifically bit a variation worked on 10.
Is this a windows joke I’m too linux to understand?
Yes if you hold “shift” for 5 seconds, it will attempt to turn on sticky keys, which makes individual key strokes act like if you were holding them down. Individually pressing ctrl, alt, del with sticky keys is like pressing ctrl+alt+del
Correction because I’m annoying: it’s when you press shift 5 times in a row. It would be terrible if just holding it down for 5 seconds activated it, haha
Ha ha, it’s still so fucking stupid though.
Hey let’s activate hard disk defragmentation if you type 1 2 3 and 4 !!
