How to turn ON or Off Secondary Shift Characters Lock in Windows 11/10

When trying to use keyboard shortcuts, we sometimes activate “secondary shift characters” that cause some hindrance. So, in this post, we will discuss how you can enable or disable Secondary Shift Characters Lock in Windows 11/10.

Enable or disable Secondary Shift Characters Lock

For some unknown reasons, secondary shift characters can get activated and display different characters than normally they would. For example, SHIFT + 6 would yield a ?, instead of the ^, and SHIFT + / would give É instead of ‘?’. It can be likely due to the SHIFT key getting stuck. Depending upon your preferences, you can enable or disable the Secondary Shift Characters Lock. Here’s how!

1. Enable or disable Allow the Shortcut keys via settings
2. Pressing & releasing the Shift key five times
3. Check Keyboards and Languages Settings

See the detailed description below.

1] Enable or disable Allow the Shortcut keys via settings

The Sticky Keys feature in Windows 11/10 makes the Shift, Windows keys, etc. active without having to do it manually. So, if it has been enabled by someone accidentally, you may see a different character coming up instead of a ‘normal one.

To fix this follow the steps mentioned below.

Windows 11:

1. Open Settings by Win + I.
2. Go to Accessibility > Keyboard > Stick keys.
3. Finally, disable Keyboard shortcuts for Sticky keys.

Windows 10:

1. Disable Allow the Shortcut keys via settings.
2. Press the Win+I combo to launch the Settings app.
3. Navigate to Ease of Access > Keyboard.
4. Then, under the Sticky Keys heading, make sure that the option for Press one key at a time for keyboard shortcuts is set to off position.

Hopefully, this will do the job for you.

2] Pressing & releasing the Shift key five times

This method yields the same result as above. Simply press and release the Shift key five times in a row to disable it. This way, if your Shift key is stuck, it will be released and secondary shift characters lock disabled. If you would like to enable secondary shift characters to lock again, press and release the Shift key 5 times.

3] Check Keyboards and Languages Settings

Another way to get around this problem is to check the ‘Keyboards and Languages’ settings. Check if it is set to English-US.

• For this, click the keyboard icon on the Taskbar.
• Click on the language and set it to English-US.

This should fix your problem.

How to enable shift lock on Windows 11?

To enable shift lock on Windows 11, you need to make some changes to the registries. Open the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\TabletTip\1.7, and look for EnableShiftLock DWORD value, if it’s not there, create one, and finally, set the Value data as 1. This will do the trick for you.

Read: How to fix Caps Lock reversed in Windows.

How do I disable Sticky Keys in Windows 11?

In Windows 11, you can find Sticky Keys from Settings >  Accessibility > Keyboard and then finally disable the Sticky Keys option. This will do the trick for you.

Read Next: Use the Shift key to enable or disable Caps Lock in Windows.