Suggestion for cleaning up your code

[djust270]

Hey there. You may not be aware of here strings in PowerShell. When defining the variable $src for the .vb file, you concatenate a bunch of strings together with a new line for each. You could simple encapsulate the entire section into a here string i.e.
$src = @'
code
'@

I just thought this might save you some trouble in the future.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/maximizing-the-power-of-here-string-in-powershell-for-configuration-data/

Oh and your restart-tray function, get-process explorer | stop-process would do the same thing (explorer is the same process as far as I can tell that the function kills) not that it matters

[Lulech23]

Thanks for the suggestion! I am aware of multiline strings this way in PowerShell, and a previous version of ReplaceOSK even used it. My problem with it is that it breaks code formatting since tabs will be interpreted as a literal part of the string, so you can't use them. Depending on the project I can get over it, but in this case I caved to my pet peeve haha. The quotes and newlines were added with regex, so it wasn't really extra work. :)

Restart-Tray gets the handle of the taskbar itself so that any open explorer windows aren't closed in the process. I always have multiple windows open across multiple desktops, so it's annoying to me when applications restart explorer rather than just the handle that needs it. Another peeve, I suppose.

[djust270]

Ah ok that makes sense. If you use a single quotation here string, that should maintain your formatting as PowerShell will treat it literally and not attempt to interpret anything inside the text. I was just thinking to myself what a pain in the butt having to write all those individual lines.

When I tried Restart-Tray on my computer, explorer closes. If I expand the $trayid variable, the process ID is the same for explorer, unless I am doing something wrong.

Anyway, thank you for writing this. I am getting my Ayaneo this week. Can you explain what tabtipproxy does and why its needed? Would replacing OSK with tabtip alone not work?

[Lulech23]

Yes, the process ID is explorer, but there are multiple handles within explorer. Killing just the taskbar handle causes explorer to restart it automatically. Killing explorer itself is permanent until reopened.

The first version of ReplaceOSK did use regular TabTip. But there were several problems and limitations with this method. Running TabTip can only open, not close the keyboard, and it will only open it if registry keys are set just right. TabTipProxy uses the Windows API to trigger the keyboard open and closed natively. As it turns out, TabTip is not the keyboard itself, just one part of a much more complicated (overcomplicated) system.