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The Ctrl+Backspace shortcut for deleting whole words is a feature in most text editors and text inputs. Due to their usefulness, they have become a part of my everyday typing habits. However, in Windows Explorer, when renaming files, Ctrl+Backspace enters a character instead of deleting the previous word. Oddly enough, it's lesser used sibling for deleting the next word Ctrl+Delete works as intended when renaming files.

This is a problem on my work PC, which uses Windows 7. But I recall this being a problem in my home PC, which is running Windows 10.

Why does this seemingly universal shortcut not work in this scenario? Are there workarounds (be it first party or third party) to implement this functionality?

moonrobin
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  • Try switching keyboard layout with ctrl + shift. The shift state may not be universal for all keyboards. I also found windows doesn't like "+" characters when setting a .exe as default program. – jiggunjer Jun 24 '16 at 16:20
  • Switching keyboard layouts does not resolve the problem. Adding a context specific hotkey to my existing AutoHotKey script did the trick! – moonrobin Jun 24 '16 at 18:34
  • I have the same behaviour inWin 10 Pro (currently 1909 but I‘ve had it for all other Win 10 builds IIRC). Cool to know, that it does not happen in other Win10. I thought Windows Explorer just never implemented this so it is never available. – bugybunny Mar 06 '20 at 10:20

1 Answers1

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So the reason for that happening (the box appearing) is that it's a control character. It's one of the several ASCII non-printable characters. Look into AutoHotKey to override the default behavior of the Control and Delete keys. Have a look at this here

ivanempire
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