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.
- Linux workaround: https://github.com/m-bartlett/remap-copilot?tab=readme-ov-file
- Windows workaround https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys/issues/560
- https://xcancel.com/dcolascione/status/2019936377408811319
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
Everything is remapable if you are good enough at soldering
But if you slap Linux on it, it just does nothing then or is it mapped as old AltGr or whatever?
Neither, it will be as if you pressed all those keys in the list above, which will most of the time do nothing
Its not immune from removal via knife
*Sry for the washed out colors. This was originally an HDR video.Why are you apologizing?
Edit: the hivemind has spoken. You must always repent for posting washed out HDR video.
They work at Disney +.
I was able to remap it with Autohotkey on Windows.
Yeah, I used PowerToys and it’s now Right Control again. It was probably easier than finding drivers for Linux.
Noted. Do not buy used laptops with microslop cancer button.
A shame because they’re all still good hardware. Just don’t want to deal with the cursed button.
It’s just a button that worse case scenario does nothing for you.
Yeah I’ve bought my last couple laptops from my company’s asset disposal department, I’ve gotten pretty good deals and usually just need to replace the battery after a few years. Not looking forward to when their stock starts getting into the models with slop buttons.
You could always just take them apart and use the components
Why would you buy this garbage?
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.
MacBooks are frikkin amazing though. There is nothing in the PC world that even comes close.
Seems like you’re comparing €1500 MacBooks to €300 laptops.
It’s always this. “This brand new £1500 laptop I don’t share with anyone, coddle like a newborn and barely use for anything other than running Office is so much better than the £350 ten year old laptop I was sharing with my entire family and was used for playing video games, downloading warez and pirated media, and running Office.”
To be fair, if I had to choose between Windows and MacOS I’d go with the latter since I do most of my job inside a terminal. A good terminal emulator, a Unix-like environment and Firefox covers most of my needs and somehow iTerm2 is a better emulator than anything I used on Linux.
Still, I’d rather avoid walled gardens and proprietary OSes.
More like €4400 and it’s used heavily for 8+ hours a day as a development machine. It’s 4 years old by now (M1 Max, 64GB) and it still handles everything I can throw at it without breaking a sweat.
Cheap laptops are nothing but trouble, in the end it’ll cost you more in replacements and lost productivity.
I enjoy my T480 I got off craigs for 120$. Cheap but awesome.
You can get a 2020 M1 / 2022 M2 Macbook air for ~400€, that will mop the floor with all new hardware in that price range released even today (completely fanless/noiseless btw.). It also has decent linux support via asahi and Apple will still probably provide 5+ years of macOS updates anyway.
- geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16388159?baseline=16471197
- ebay.de sold macbooks: https://www.ebay.de/sch/111422/i.html?_fsrp=1&_udlo=150&rt=nc&_nkw=macbook+air+(m1%2Cm2)&_sacat=111422&_sop=13&LH_PrefLoc=3&LH_Sold=1&LH_ItemCondition=1000|2010|1500|2020|2030|2500|3000
- random lenovo: https://www.notebooksbilliger.de/lenovo+v15+g5+83gw00a7ge+820626
The simple trick to owning nice hardware is to never give vendors your money directly, let others burden the depreciation.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just Microsoft, Apple is also a patent troll
All megacorps are
Patents need to be abolished
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.
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.
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
Doesn’t seem to be present on my keyboard. 😁


Oh, wow. There it is. The keyboard of my dreams.
Using one of these while on acid does not seem advisable, though.
What’s the keyboard? Always wanted to try an arisu/Alice/derivations.
Netscape Navigator key, 1337 retronaut.
Congrats Microsoft, you managed to enshittify a goddamn keyboard key.
The WHATNOW is impossible to properly remap?
That nuisance you pop off with a flathead screwdriver and throw in the trash can.
Note to self: start looking into building my own keyboards if it ever becomes standard, somehow.
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.
It’s the Bixby Button all over again.
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.This mess is by design. They pay the manufacturers (a pretty penny, I’m sure) to put it on there.
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.
well that’s what they should have done but now what 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
It has to me software/firmware based, right? Right!?
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
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Words of wisdom, for sure.
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.
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
If this garbage is on my keyboard I will drill that motherfucker out no second thought
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)
IT ALSO HAS DEDICATED BUTTONS FOR VOLUME CONTROL
Bro, that’s so cool … your keys have backup’s
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Or just glue a new keycap in place
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