My media hotkeys (play, pause, next, etc.) have been stolen by an unknown process. How do I find a list of which global hotkeys are registered to which program in Windows 10? There are a few programs out there that do this but they only work up to Windows 7 and screw up on Windows 8+.
Windows 10 – How to Find Programs with Registered Global Hotkeys
hotkeyswindows 10
Best Answer
Hotkeys and multimedia keys may be overridden by hardware or drivers(unlikely), by a running program, or by system setting.
These three are distinct, and need different ways to check and solve.
Hardware
Your keyboard may have different modes, usually selectable with FN key combination. Some smart keyboards are configurable through a windows utility. See your keyboard documentation.
Running programs
Although this approach is a bit brutal, I suggest launching the task manager and terminating all processes except system ones like: svchost, lsass, csrss, smss, services, userinit, dwm, winlogon, explorer.
If that helped, reboot and try terminating them one by one to see which one causes problems. You can disable startup of offending process through
msconfig
or SysInternalsautoruns
programs.System settings
Press windows Start button, type 'regedit' and browse to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Delete registry key ("folder") named
AppKey
if it exists.Now browse to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AppKey
and do not delete it.There are few subkeys (subfolders) that define which program is started when a multimedia key is pressed.
Below are the defaults for windows 7, yours should be similar:
To assign a key to a program of your choice, delete any values under appropriate registry key, and create a new string (REG_SZ) value named
ShellExecute
and a full path to a program of your choice as a value, such asc:\vlc\vlc.exe
If there is no key with the number you need (see below), just create one.
Here is a list of known multimedia keys and their corresponding numbers under
Appkey\
(Aforementioned list was copied from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/microsoft.public.fr.windowsxp/zZolgM6PC4o/sRJv2NtrB-8J (in French) )
The settings should work after reboot.
Desktop shortcuts
It may be possible to assign the hotkeys you need to a shortcut on windows desktop, start menu, quick launch panel, or pinned to the task bar.
Searching through those could be a pain, instead you may want to copy following text in a new text file, replace
c:\
in first line with your user home directory path such asc:\Users\jwhite\
, save under a nameScript.vbs
and run it.After a few minutes it should create a file named
test.txt
in the same folder as script itself with contents such as:Software
AFAIK, Windows Hotkey Explorer software worked by pressing every hotkey it could, and then attempting to intercept whatever got called as a result. I believe as of Windows 8 and higher it is not possible to intercept hotkeys that way anymore, therefore this method no longer works, so there may be no such a software possible.
I believe asking for software recommendation may not be appropriate for SuperUser.com anyway, instead you may want to upvote following question on website dedicated for that: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/33669/tool-to-list-all-current-windows-hotkeys