Skip to main content

How to Disable Windows Rotate Screen Keyboard Shortcut

I love keyboard shortcuts and hot-keys. I learn and use as many of them as I can.
Sometimes, however, the same short-cut can get defined by multiple parts of a system and can create surprising results.

For example: when working in Eclipse IDE, a very useful one is CTRL-ALT-UP (or DOWN) arrow. It takes whatever line the cursor is currently on and duplicates it above or below the current line. It also works on highlighted blocks of lines.
I use it all the time to preserve the original form of a line or block. For example, when I am writing unit-tests that are all related, I take the one I just wrote and CTRL-ALT-DOWN to copy it, then I modify the duplicated code for my next test. Saves retying the boiler-plate.
I may also use it when modifying some code. I duplicate it with CTRL-ALT-DOWN keyboard short cut and then while the line(s) are highlighted still, I do a CTRL-ForwardSlash which in Eclipse comments out the line. This preserves the original line while I tinker and experiment.


Unfortunately, on my new Windows 10 laptop, the Graphics driver also defines CTRL-ALT-DOWN (or UP) - it rotates the screen display 180 degrees. And it takes precedence over the Eclipse short-cut.

To disable the graphics one, whose usefulness to me is very low (why on earth would I rotate it 180 degrees? Possibly when sending output to a projector?)

To disable the Graphics short-cuts, right-click on the desktop. Then select Graphics Options and the Hotkeys sub-menu. And select Disable.

This is the way it looks on my machine, running Windows 10 with an Intel processor and Intel graphics driver:

Popular posts from this blog

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history:  http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For ...

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc...

Updating Oracle javapath symlinks on Windows

A Java-based application on my Windows 10 machine recently started prompting me to upgrade my version of Java. Since I wanted to control it myself, I declined the app's offer to upgrade for me, and downloaded and installed the latest Java 8 from Oracle. In my case, Java 1.8.0_171, 64-bit version. The upgrade went fine. But when I launched the app, it again said I needed to upgrade. Why was it still looking at the old location? I made the change using Settings, to change the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the location of the new upgrade. But no change, the app still insisted that I needed to upgrade. A little research into the app's execution path showed that it was using c:\ProgramData\Oracle\Java\javapath to find Java. When I looked in that folder, I found symbolic links to my old Java installation. Normally, this hidden bit of information gets updated automatically in the upgrade or installation process. I have read of cases where, when downg...

Code Coverage in C#.NET Unit Tests - Setting up OpenCover

The purpose of this post is to be a brain-dump for how we set up and used OpenCover and ReportGenerator command-line tools for code coverage analysis and reporting in our projects. The documentation made some assumptions that took some digging to fully understand, so to save my (and maybe others') time and effort in the future, here are my notes. Our project, which I will call CEP for short, includes a handful of sub-projects within the same solution. They are a mix of Web APIs, ASP MVC applications and Class libraries. For Unit Tests, we chose to write them using the MSTest framework, along with the Moq mocking framework. As the various sub-projects evolved, we needed to know more about the coverage of our automated tests. What classes, methods and instructions had tests exercising them, and what ones did not? Code Coverage tools are conveniently built-in for Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, but not for our Professional Edition installations. Much less for any Commun...