Quickie: Disable shift-shift for Google Desktop

February 27th, 2008 by Scott

This has been driving me nuts. I’m typing along, and somehow all my Google gadgets come to the top and I lose focus. It’s the shift-shift shortcut. Google’s page on this describes it but has no info on how to disable it. They talk about the other shortcuts of course… Searching the web found a ton of people with the same problem all begging for help. I finally found the answer!

  • Go to your Google Desktop prefs (right-click its icon in the tray and do Options)

  • On the Display panel at the bottom for the Taskbar Gadgets Button section choose “Show icon only” and save your prefs. I bet you had this thing hidden like me, right? To save space in your taskbar?

  • Click on the down arrow button in the new Google icon (looks like four colored boxes stuck together) and there it is! Choose Enable Hotkey to disable the damn thing.

  • Now you can go back to prefs and hide the button again.

    • So to disable all the Google Desktop hotkeys, you need to (a) turn off ctrl-ctrl in Options, (b) (via the above Google link), edit the registry and reboot to disable the ctrl-alt-G, and (c) do the instructions I have above to disable shift-shift.

    Hey Google, want to make this a little more consistent in a future release?

    Posted in fix, googledesktop |

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    14 comments on this post.

    1. Nicholas Chambers:

      March 13th, 2008 at 2:59 pm

      Thanks Scott, that really helped. I hated the bloody thing. :P

    2. Adil:

      July 4th, 2008 at 5:41 am

      Thanks, the shift-shift has been annoying me for a while

    3. matt robertson:

      August 11th, 2008 at 3:53 am

      Awesome, thank you! I had tried google’s suggested registry hack to no avail, and this got me out of a fix. Thanks!

    4. Anonymous:

      October 17th, 2008 at 11:10 am

      Thank you so much

    5. Hiroki:

      November 16th, 2008 at 5:39 pm

      Thank you very much for the information!
      It helps me a lot:)

    6. Harro:

      November 19th, 2008 at 1:00 am

      Thanks a lot!

    7. Ed:

      November 19th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

      Scott, this is a work of genius! The noise level and layer of smashed keyboards in my office will no doubt now decrease exponentially.

      Can’t believe it was there as an option all along! Matter of fact, I’m guessing I enabled the thing in the first place, then hid the icon.

      Thanks also for trawling through the google desktop forums and contacting me.

    8. Ben:

      November 20th, 2008 at 11:28 am

      Scott,
      Thanks much for posting this. I’ll make sure we add this information to our Support article to reduce confusion. Much appreciated!

      Ben
      Google Desktop Guide

    9. Ben:

      November 21st, 2008 at 11:36 am

      I actually had one more comment…

      Just keep in mind that you now have no way to bring undocked gadgets to focus with both the hotkey and the gadgets button disabled. You may want to enable at least the gadget icon (smaller footprint than the text button) so you can still use this feature.

      Cheers,
      Ben
      Google Desktop Guide at the Google Desktop Help forum
      http://groups.google.com/group/google-desktop

    10. Scott:

      November 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am

      Thanks for the updates Ben.

    11. George:

      January 18th, 2009 at 1:37 pm

      This is awesome! However, despite Ben’s comment I am having the following difficulty

      So the shift-shift invoke is indeed a pain, and is now banished.
      However the esc-esc invoke, despite being switched on in preferences now doesn’t work (either with or without the google icon showing)
      And the Win-Space invoke for gadgets (which is much harder to accidentally trigger, and is great) also doesn’t work.

      So now I’ve gone from too sensitive an invoke, to none at all. Being brought up on Goldilocks, I wonder if there is something to suit the middle bear?

    12. Scott:

      January 19th, 2009 at 5:09 pm

      Haha, man. I hope Ben comes back and turns this into a feature request to redo the key config stuff.

      Every other Windows app out there that has global hotkeys has a dialog to configure them. Google Desktop has been out for how many years now?

    13. Bruce:

      February 3rd, 2009 at 2:37 pm

      Thanks a ton. I thought I saw something for disabling it somewhere, but forgot about disabling the gadget task bar. It’s been driving me nuts for months.

    14. Sieghard:

      January 24th, 2010 at 7:48 am

      Thank you very very much!!!

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