Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Kevin asks:
Oh might guru, might you offer sage advice to a humble servant?I've recently enabled the language bar in Vista so I could enter some Chinese characters to do some intl testing. It worked great, except for one problem - I can't seem to disable the language switch hotkey (ctrl-space, not so good for a Visual Studio developer). I tried editing the Key Sequence on all the Advanced Key Settings actions to uncheck the Enable Key Sequence checkbox for each. That worked for all of them except the last - Chinese (Simplified) IME - Ime/NonIme Toggle. When I try to disable that key sequence, it lets me clear the checkbox, but when I hit Apply or OK, bingo it's back to being enabled again. Help!
The dialog Kevin is referring to is this one in the Text Services and Input Languages dialog, in the Advanced Key Settings tab:
And Kevin is right -- that setting will simply not stick when you try to make no key sequence work -- it will always switch back to this one.
Definitely a bug.
The way it hits Kevin is almost a VS version of this bug, but not quite. :-)
Not sure how sage that was (or this next part will be, for that matter!), but the only workaround I found was assigning some other less annoying key sequence that you'd be less likely to press....
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Thanks. At least I know that I'm not crazy or irretrievably stupid.
Well, not stupid anyway. ;)
I swear I had problems even changing the keystroke to something more obscure (and I ended up removing the chinese language option because of it). But now I added it back in, and keyboard hotkey switching doesn't seem to work at all (I have to use the tray applet). *Sigh* Well, that's better than always using ctrl-space anyway.
Some time ago, Michael Kaplan wrote about the Ctrl Space hotkey and its broken configuration in Windows Vista. What is particularly evil about the Ctrl Space combination is that takes control even when the language is not selected. So you can be
This is also a problem in XP. And unfortunately it's still not fixed in Vista SP1 :-(
Also, assigning a different hot key doesn't really work - sooner or later it is back at Ctrl-Space.
Any ideas? Assigning / unassigning a new hot key seems to be completely ignored (Vista SP1). If I want to program I need to remove the Chinese IME. And then if I want to type Chinese I need to reinstall the IME.
Unfortunately in Windows Vista uninstalling the IME is still not sufficient. It keeps reappearing and reassigning the Ctrl+Space sequence. This is excessively frustrating because I cannot get rid of it at all.
Does anyone know the correct registry settings to remove the damn thing?
yup, this is really annoying... as i am a graphic designer, working on adobe photoshop and illustrator are pain in the arse.... when i try to zoom in, it changes itself to chinese input. anyone knows how to deal with this? thank you.
I'm a programmer; I use Visual Studio and Emacs, so ctrl-space is vital to what I do every day. I've discovered that using an alternative desktop shell such as GeoShell alleviates this issue.
It's kind of a shame really, I was starting to get into the shell enhancements they made for Vista. Maybe I'll switch back when and if I see that there's an official fix for this.
This "solution" also points out that this must be a bug in explorer.exe, or in its interaction with the language system (such as where explorer.exe keeps its keyboard hooks).
So the question that came in from Grant via the Contact link was kind of interesting: What are the "Hot
Alt+Right Arrow can be used in Visual Studio as an alternative to Ctrl+Space
Alt+Right Arrow can be used for intellisense, but I use Emacs and the Emacs keyboard scheme in Visual Studio, for which there can be no alternative to ctrl+space.
The main issue is that the keyboard should be left open for applications by the operating system; looking at my keyboard, I can only see one key that I would expect windows to "steal".
I somehow work around this way: install one more language
I install Japanese and Chinese on an English win XP. Woops, XP does not response the Ctrl-Space any more, lalala...
I think properly XP just sits there and does not know which ime toggle to.
Hei's advice didn't work for me unfortunately. Still cycles IME with more than one IME. This problem also makes the keyboard shortcut in Excel (CTRL+Space) not work.
Thanks But after this Disable also In Excel Contr + Space Shortcut key not working Why......
This same problem occurred to me while using Flash CS4 on Vista. I was trying to change the Keyboard Shortcut for the magnifier tool to the more familiar Ctrl-Space, when the Language Bar switched to Chinese Traditional Taiwan.
So I unchecked Enable Key Sequence and changed the shortcut to something obscure, like Shift-LeftAlt-F12. It seemed to work for a while, but whenever I went back to Flash the same thing happened. So I felt I had no choice but to remove the Chinese language packs, but IT STILL SWITCHED TO CHINESE.
After trying to figure out what happened, I realized that Ctrl-Space only switched to Chinese on applications that were already open, but (finally) didn't work when I opened new applications or restarted the existing ones. Very strange behavior, indeed.
Amazingly, this problem STILL EXISTS in Windows 7!!! I've really got to wonder if MS is paying attention at all. Do they have no engineers in China??? I really can't believe it.