Hide the ⌘/Ctrl key from other apps: Assistly's advanced keystroke setting
By The Assistly team ·
Assistly's hotkeys are designed to stay between you and Assistly. When you hit your capture or Ask shortcut, the keystroke fires the action and gets consumed — it never leaks through to the app you're working in. That's already true out of the box.
But there's one more layer available for people who want it. Tucked under Advanced in the keybinds settings is a toggle called Hide the ⌘ key from other apps (Hide the Ctrl key from other apps on Windows). It's off by default, and this post is the honest explanation of what it does, why it has a real trade-off, and when flipping it on is the right call.
What it actually does
Normally, every app on your machine can observe the modifier keys you press. Even if a shortcut "belongs" to another program, the operating system still broadcasts the raw key events — ⌘ went down, ⌘ came up — to anything watching the keyboard, including the app in front of you and any keystroke logger running in the background.
With this setting on, Assistly swallows the bare modifier key itself — the ⌘ key on macOS, the Ctrl key on Windows — on both press and release, before it reaches anything downstream. The focused app never sees ⌘ being held. A keystroke logger never records it. As far as the rest of your system is concerned, that key was never touched.
Crucially, Assistly's own shortcuts keep working the whole time. The way it hides the key is also what lets it still read it: on macOS the interception happens at the lowest level of the input pipeline (an event tap installed at the HID level), so Assistly reads the modifier from the key event directly, upstream of where other apps would normally pick it up. On Windows, because the system's usual hotkey mechanism can no longer see Ctrl either, Assistly detects and fires its own combos from inside the keyboard hook instead. Either way, your Assistly hotkeys fire exactly as before — it's only other apps that go dark on the key.
Why it's off by default
Here's the honest catch, and the reason this lives under "Advanced" rather than being on for everyone: hiding the key and feeding it to other apps' shortcuts are the same signal. You can't do one without the other.
So while this setting is on, every ⌘-based shortcut in other apps stops working — ⌘C to copy, ⌘V to paste, ⌘Tab to switch apps, ⌘Space for Spotlight, and so on. On Windows it's the Ctrl equivalents: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+A. Your muscle memory will hit copy, and nothing will happen, because the key that would trigger it is being intercepted before it arrives.
That's a big enough disruption to normal work that it would be wrong to make it the default. Most people want their copy-paste to just work. So the toggle starts off, and you turn it on deliberately, for the stretch of time you actually want it.
When you'd want it on
Turn it on when you specifically want none of your modifier keystrokes to be observable by anything but Assistly — for example, if you're on a machine where you're not sure what's monitoring the keyboard, and you'd rather your modifier usage simply not show up in anything's key log at all.
The mental model: leave it off for normal work where you're constantly copying, pasting, and tab-switching in other apps. Flip it on for a focused window where the only thing you need the modifier key for is Assistly itself, and you'd prefer the key be invisible to everything else. Flip it back off the moment you want ⌘C to work again.
The honest limits
A few things this setting is not, so there's no confusion:
- It's about the local keyboard, not the network. This hides the modifier key from other apps and loggers running on your own machine. It's a separate mechanism from the OS-level screen-capture exclusion that keeps the overlay out of a screen share — that's what makes Assistly invisible to the other people on your call, and it's on regardless of this toggle.
- It only hides the bare modifier key. This is deliberately scoped to the ⌘/Ctrl key itself. Assistly already reserves its own combo space so its shortcuts don't leak into the app behind it; this setting extends that to make the modifier key literally unobservable downstream.
- On macOS it needs Accessibility permission. Intercepting keystrokes requires granting Assistly access under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. You can grant it at runtime without restarting.
As always, use Assistly within the rules of whatever meeting, call, or interview you're in. This setting is a control over what other software on your own machine can see your keyboard doing — a power-user option, off until you decide you want it.