Quick accent - global enable/disable hotkey

[tonank]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Some applications conflict with quick accent. Especially games and their controls. It would be nice to have a global enable/disable hotkey like ctrl+win+a or something similar. I don't like to enable disable through the settings menu.

Scenario when this would be used?

When I play a game and then switch over to write something that needs accents.

Supporting information

No response

[taras-janea]

@tonank thank you for your feedback.
Would it be helpful to you to exclude the game using QuickAccents settings?

/needinfo

[tonank]

I saw "disable in game mode". It seems to work fine!

[jmdevin]

This feature would still be useful to me as originally described. Some of my work contexts necessitate non-qwerty characters and others don't. Sadly these contexts don't align with individual programs. I'm switching between multiple different conversations/tickets during the day. When I don't need extended characters, my fat fingers tend to accidentally insert them not too infrequently (I'm aware the timeout can be set, but setting it any longer is pretty annoying).

If I could quickly globally enable/disable the quick accent feature it would significantly speed up my ability to move between documents, conversations, and tickets rather than needing to open powertoys settings and toggle it as I often do now.

[jmdevin]

@crutkas would it be better if I opened this as a new ticket or could it be discussed here?

[crutkas]

Here works

[Mahfoudh94]

due to this tool being useful from time to time in video games, and sometimes conflicting even while writing, I suggest adding Hotkeys to enable/disable such tool, or changing the fundamental way this tool works maybe to be like WizKey or WinCompose.
I am ready to program the first solution MYSELF and contribute toward making this tool amazing.

[Derpford]

Seconding the idea of a quick enable/disable button. I don't use this feature often, and disabling Quick Accent via Game Mode has the same "dig up the right settings window" problem as disabling Quick Accent via its own toggle--with the added overhead that Game Mode doesn't reliably improve performance when gaming and makes some games perform worse. Having a keybind to toggle it on and off would make using Quick Accent way easier.

Alternatively, being able to freely bind an activation key--instead of being limited to left/right, space, or both--would also solve a lot of this. I press letters and space all the time when playing FPS games, and am just as likely to be pressing letters and arrow keys if I'm playing a 2D game, but I'm far less likely to be pressing, say, letters and the Insert key.

[Jay-o-Way]

Just to check: the fly-out of the tray icon is not fast enough, right?

[Mahfoudh94]

Just to check: the fly-out of the tray icon is not fast enough, right?

yes, it is inefficient to go open that menu every now and then within a short time window. it gets even more frustrating when that fly-out is quite irresponsive, this behavior is noticed on some low to mid-end devices

[Mahfoudh94]

I'm working on the proposed solution here, help is welcomed and many times favorable and wanted as Im not that proficient in this blend (C++ & C# together and many frameworks on top).

[Jay-o-Way]

@Mahfoudh94 thanks for picking this up. What's your idea to handle this?

[Mahfoudh94]

The idea I got is to add a shortcut controller in the settings under enable/disable toggle, and link it to a shortcut that is saved with it in the settings, this shortcut is retrieved by the background process and linked with the action of enable disable, whenever it is triggered, it saves it and the ViewModel refreshes.
If I may ask for your help, I got a problem in a single XAML file (which is the view), It compiles and run with no problem, but when it runs in CI/CD, it says it is malformated and fails.

[Mahfoudh94]

Thanks, @htcfreek, I already got one open and Jamie is already in the help, the CI/CD problem is already fixed and I'm waiting for the merge after some discussions, you can check it on #31413