How to connect a Bluetooth device with a hotkey on Windows 10

Bluetooth, and Bluetooth devices aren’t the easiest to interact with outside of the built-in options that Windows 10 provides you. Even those don’t always work right. This isn’t entirely a Windows 10 problem because there are a lot of Bluetooth devices out there with varying  capabilities. That said, if you want to connect a Bluetooth device with a hotkey, you can use a script, and Bluetooth Command Line tools to do the job.

This is for devices that you’ve already paired with your PC. If the device hasn’t been paired yet, go ahead and pair it first. Make sure that Bluetooth is turned on, on your system.

Connect Bluetooth device via hotkey

First, visit this page and download Bluetooth Command Line Tools. Install it, and allow it to be added as a Path variable.

Once it’s been installed, open Command Prompt with admin rights and run the following command. It will return the MAC address for all Bluetooth devices.

btdiscovery

Copy the MAC address of the Bluetooth device you want to connect via a hotkey.

Visit this Github page and download or clone the repository. Inside, you will find several files. The first file you need to access is the mac.txt file. Open it and paste the MAC address you copied.

That’s most things done. Now we enter a somewhat ‘test’ phase. The files include two types of scripts labelled ‘connect’ and ‘disconnect’. You can use either the BAT script or the VBS script to connect/disconnect the device. The test part is where you run them and see which ones works the best. For me, it was the batch file.

Once you’ve figured out what works, create a shortcut to the script, and set a keyboard shortcut to run it. The process is the same no matter what type of script it is.

Limitations

This may not work for all devices. It may also take quite a while for the device to connect. In fact, it might take so long that you prefer to use the Connect quick action in the Action Center to connect your device.

If you want to use this for multiple devices, you will need to copy/clone the entire Github repo for each one, and set up the MAC address for the devices in each repo.

If it’s too slow, you will likely not use it but this is the unfortunate problem with Bluetooth devices. Even Windows 10 isn’t able to work with them all. It has a battery feature that allows you to view battery percentage of Bluetooth devices but there’s a third-party app that does it better.