Hotkey Screener - Free Tool to Enumerate Hotkeys and Detect Apps which Use Them

Hotkey Screener enumerates all system-wide hotkeys installed with the RegisterHotKey API. For every hotkey, you can press “Detect application” and see which application responds to this hotkey. Hotkey Screener can handle all 64-bit and 32-bit processes running with standard and administrative privileges. It supports all versions of Windows from 7 to 11.

Hotkey Screener - Light Mode

In Dark mode:

Hotkey Screener - Light Mode

Detecting Applications which Use Hotkeys

Unfortunately, there is no documented way to detect which application uses a particular hotkey on Windows. Hotkey Screener installs a global message hook DLL, emulates a hotkey press and then listens for hotkey events.

Hotkey Screener - Detecting Applications

On 64-bit operating systems, there are 2 types of processes which may use hotkeys: native 64-bit processes and 32-bit running in WoW64 mode. Also, processes might be running with “standard user” privileges and with “elevated” privileges (admin or UIAccess). Hotkey Screener handles all these scenarios.

Running with UIAccess Privileges

If you see the following message too often, just copy the downloaded EXE and DLL files into a %ProgramFiles% directory (for example, C:\Program Files\Hotkey Screener) and restart Hotkey Screener from this directory.

Hotkey Screener - Admin Rights

When Hotkey Screener Fails to Detect Applications

The most common case is when one application registers a hotkey and another uses a low-level keyboard hook or raw input to suppress this hotkey action. In this case, you will see the hotkey action from the second application.

Hotkey Screener - Warning

Be careful and save your data before detecting applications!

Download

Just download the ZIP file and unpack:


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