- A new option for the Copilot key has been detected during testing.
- Windows 11 users have the ability to reassign it to ‘Do nothing’
- This is in addition to the work already being done to redefine the right Ctrl key or the context menu.
Microsoft’s latest revolutionary idea for Windows 11 is to have a key on your keyboard that can be remapped to do absolutely nothing.
The latest twist in the Copilot key story was noted by Windows Latest, as highlighted by regular X leaker PhantomOfEarth, who spotted the hidden development in a recent preview build of Windows 11.
In the options for customizing the Copilot key, which, by default, summons Windows 11’s Copilot AI (of course), there’s a new option to simply “Do nothing.”
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Yes, that’s right: you can change the key to be just a pointless piece of plastic that locks precisely. (Or at least it will be able to during testing, when this capability comes into play, that is, although some Windows 11 testers have reportedly already seen it live in preview.)
As you may have seen earlier this year, Microsoft is working to bring new options to the Copilot key including customizing it to invoke the context menu (right-click) and converting it back to Right Ctrl (which was the key that replaced the Copilot button on Copilot+ laptops and some keyboards).
Analysis: do nothing, be happy
What’s the point of a key that does nothing? Good question. Maybe it’s the keyboard equivalent of a stress ball: You can press that key as much as you want when you’re really upset, and it won’t waste a bunch of characters in the document you’re working on while you exorcise your frustrated demons.
Well, maybe not, but maybe the idea is that this is aimed at people who really hate the Copilot key, but haven’t decided what they’d want to remap it to. So they can go ahead and choose to have the key do nothing if it’s accidentally pressed, while they figure out what they might want to redefine instead. Admittedly, that’s overstating things, but it’s the best guess I have.
In any case, it is a fairly harmless option, although it is inevitably strange to have a “blank” key on the keyboard. How far we’ve fallen since Microsoft first revealed and trumpeted the Copilot key as the most important thing to happen to keyboards in the 30 years since the Windows key was introduced. And in fact, more recently, Microsoft touted the Copilot key as the “button you can press to fix everything,” so it’s ironic that it may soon (optionally) become the button you can press to fix “nothing” in a very literal sense.
Don’t forget that you don’t have to wait for Microsoft’s Copilot key remapping features in the release version of Windows 11. You can use the Keyboard Manager in PowerToys to do this, although of course it will be much better to have these options in Windows 11 settings.
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