«
»

Keyboard shortcuts for rotation

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 by David Heffernan

One of the changes we made in OrcaFlex 9.1 was a re-mapping of keyboard shortcuts. Mostly this was motivated by a desire to map CTRL+S to File | Save and CTRL+O to File | Open.

To make room for these changes we had to rearrange a number of other shortcuts. In particular the shortcuts to rotate the 3D View were changed to CTRL+ALT+ ← → ↑ ↓. Shortly after releasing version 9.1 we began to hear reports from some users that their laptop screen would suddenly be displayed upside down, or on its side, after using one of these shortcuts.

After a little detective work we have traced the issue to a piece of Intel software that is stealing these keyboard shortcuts before they reach OrcaFlex. The solution is as follows:

  1. Open the Control Panel and make sure it uses Classic View.
  2. Double click the Intel GMA Driver for mobile icon.
  3. Select the Hot Keys page.
  4. Deselect the “Enable Hot Keys” option.

This will fix the problem for Intel graphics cards, but there may be similar problems for cards from other manufacturers, or even for different Intel cards. I’m guessing that similar solutions will be available and that the steps described above should help you solve such problems.

This entry is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Keyboard shortcuts for rotation”

  1. Phil Pedlow Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 06:26

    Yes, agreed that is a solution, but i find the Intel shortcuts quite useful and idon’t want to keep switching between the two. Perhaps the shortcuts could be remapped (again!) to ctrl+shift+arrow keys?

  2. David Heffernan Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 10:47

    Well, we could do that, but we’d probably just fall foul of shortcuts used by a different program!

    Apparently the latest versions of the Intel drivers allow you to configure which hotkeys are intercepted by the Intel driver. We are not the only program to have been caught ought by this and I guess that Intel have enabled the hotkey configuration to allow people to work around such clashes.

    Basically Intel really shouldn’t be intercepting non-system key-presses which are meant for applications. However, as you say, that functionality can be useful and by allowing the hotkey to be configured by the user does provide the user a way to get the best of both worlds.

    I recommend you try to reconfigure the Intel hotkeys in their driver control panel. If you can’t change the hotkeys then you should try updating to the latest version of the Intel driver.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.