Think Windows 11’s Copilot key is useless? We’ve got good news: You’ll soon be able to reconfigure it
When Microsoft introduced the Copilot key, all we could think was: this is honestly a waste of precious real estate on a laptop keyboard. And for those of you who have the key and feel that way, here’s good news: you can now reconfigure it, at least for testing.
In the new Beta Channel preview build 22635 for Windows 11, Microsoft has made it possible to remap the Copilot key to launch an app instead of invoking the AI assistant.
As Microsoft explains in a blog postThere is a small catch, however: “You can choose to have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX compressed and signed, indicating that the app meets security and privacy requirements to keep customers safe.”
We’ll get into the exact implications of this in a moment, but the bottom line is that you can’t assign the key to any application you want. That’s only true for MSIX apps.
There’s no change to the Copilot key’s default behavior as you might expect: when you first get your shiny new Copilot+ laptop, it will still summon the AI assistant when you press it. You can reconfigure this in the Settings app, in Personalization > Text inputat least when this change is implemented in the release version of Windows 11 – and we can’t see why it would be dropped during testing.
The MSIX configuration caveat
As mentioned, the caveat is that you will need to remap the Copilot key to launch an MSIX app, which is a Windows app package created by Microsoft for the purpose of better security (among other benefits). In short, many Windows apps are not MSIX-packaged, and if a particular application you want a shortcut to isn’t, you’re out of luck.
This feature is still being tested at the moment, so it is possible that Microsoft will change this requirement – we will have to see later. The reason for mandating MSIX is, as noted, the better security offered in this installation format compared to MSI (its predecessor).
Of course, those who get frustrated with the limitation can always remap the Copilot key using third-party key mapping software, but that’s not as convenient as a native option. (At least, that is, if that native option has all the functionality regarding the apps you can map the key to.)
We don’t have a Copilot key on our keyboard, and as you can probably guess from how this article started, we don’t want one. Even those at TechRadar who experimented with the key didn’t find it particularly revolutionary.
All in all, introducing an option to reconfigure the key could be seen as a bit of an embarrassment on Microsoft’s part, considering the fuss when the Copilot key was revealed. If you recall, the move was heralded as the “first significant change” to the Windows keyboard in some 30 years, and that the Copilot key would become a “core part” of the keyboard, like the Windows key itself.
That said, if the Copilot assistant ends up being much more useful in Windows 11 going forward, perhaps the dedicated key could end up having more of a reason to exist, rather than feeling like a forced addition, at least to us.
