How to disable a key on the keyboard on Windows 10

Keyboards come in all sorts of physical layouts. Some have more keys than others and you may or may not find them all useful. The thing is, even if you don’t use a key on your keyboard, it’s still there. It can be remapped but if you prefer it to do nothing, you can disable it. Here’s how you can disable a key on the keyboard on Windows 10.

Disable key on keyboard

When it comes to changing how a keyboard key works on Windows 10, the go-to app for the job is AutoHotKey. The little scripting utility isn’t just for changing how a key is executed or what it does. It can also be used just as easily to disable a key. In fact, it’s one of the easier things to do as far as writing a script is concerned.

The only slightly complicated part about disabling a key is figuring out how to identify it in an AHK script. AutoHotKey has extensive documentation available on how to declare keys. Once you know how to identify the key in the script, you can write it.

Open a new Notepad file and enter the following;

CapsLock::return

The above will disable the CapsLock key. If you need to disable a different key, all you have to do is change the key that’s declared at the start of the script. To be precise, you will be replacing the ‘CapsLock’ bit. Save it with the AHK file extension and then run it. As long as the script is running, the key that you’ve declared will not work.

If you need the key to always be disabled but don’t want to be bothered running it each time you boot up your system, you can create a shortcut to the AHK script and add it to the Startup folder, or you can just move the original script file to the Startup folder. Both options will do the trick.

You can declare and disable as many keys as you want in a single script. Just move to another line and enter the next key that you want to disable it. Follow the key up with two colons, and then add ‘return’ after it.

This will disable the key after you’ve booted to the desktop. So long as you’re on the boot screen, the login screen, or in your BIOS, the key will still work. This is because neither the script not AutoHotKey are running. This is a software solution and not a hardware fix.