How can I disable Escape key binding in Zoom?

[jimonthebarn]

When I press it, it shows the meeting controls while I am sharing my screen. I use the escape key a lot while coding and it is annoying that I have to re-hide the meeting controls every time I hit Escape because it messes with my workflow.

[jimonthebarn]

As a workaround, I set a keyboard shortcut for hiding zooms (within the client settings-> keyboard shortcuts -> meeting) controls so that I can manually hide it after accidentally bringing it up. But I would actually prefer to not show the hidden controls in the first place.

[dbechrd]

This drives me and my coworkers nuts. Why is there no option to set the unhide to some custom keybind? It's wayyy too easy to unhide accidentally. I have to press Esc all the time for _many_ other reasons and then Zoom thing pops up under my cursor and I start clicking random meeting buttons when I'm trying to demo something to multi-billion dollar companies.

[geekyink]

Zoom. Why are you hijacking a system key. ESC is to be used as a system wide "command + ." to escape windows and dialogs, this is absolutely horrid that you are using it in app to hide/show controls. Please change this hotkey and give us back the ESC key.

[geekyink]

Here we are 2 years later & Zoom still has the ESC key hijacked when screen sharing. Me and my team literally complain about this multiple times a day, it's the running joke in our office, it is the number one grievance we have with Zoom and honestly we would move to a different product once our contract is up specifically due to how annoying this is. Zoom, do better, it's not that hard.

[Minnesota_Bob]

Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you so much for validating my frustration with this.  I thought I was the only one.  This gives me a cathartic release to know that I am just one in a community of sufferers!  I'm a CSCI instructor and have searched high and low, experimented near and far, and asked for help from the exalted to the lowly without success.   Your responses are the final grim confirmation:  THERE IS NO FIX FOR THIS.  And yes!  why?  Why?  WHY?! did ZOOM not only hijack one of the most widely used control keys but then not allow users to remap it?  ARGHHHH.....  The only reasonable solution was suggested by our IT Department.  Have two displays, and move the floating meeting controls to the second display.  Problem is that not only do you need a 2nd display, but you need the room to locate a 2nd display.  ZOOM Company!  please, Please, PLEASE FIX THIS!  

[HennoT]

Zoom, please provide custom keyboard shortcut to unhide the Zoom controls while they are hidden. We have to re-hide Zoom controls every time Esc needs to be pressed in gazillion applications, especially IDEs like Jetbrains and VSCode to exit Ctrl+F windows and such, which makes Zoom panels to reappear and IDE to lose focus and one has to yet again close the Zoom panel and then move the mouse cursor back onto IDE window and click it to regain focus to IDE. And this happens countless of times per day.

Please fix this!!!!

[dbechrd]

Honestly I don't think Zoom cares at all. They're Too Big To Fail (TM). They can just cruise along with the same mediocre product they created 10 years ago and make billions of dollars. It's the same as every other piece of software made by big companies. Our team started switching to Tuple, which has a number of its own problems, but it seems like the team is much smaller and actually cares about your feedback, so perhaps consider trying it out if you're on Windows or Mac. It doesn't have Linux support atm. The UI while video sharing is infinitely better than Zoom's enormous overlay that you can't even drag off the side of the screen, let alone hide properly without it reappearing every 10 seconds. Tuple has some perf issues, but I'd rather support a company who's actively trying to improve their product. The amount of time it would take Zoom to add a hotkey bind for this feature is at most 2 hours of dev time including designing, testing, deploying, etc. The amount of our time it would save is countless hours per person it affects, which I assure you is many more than the 4-5 people who took our time to come report the issue here. It's at least 30 people in just my one small company. Likely tens of thousands of people per day, if not more, are frustrated by something that could be fixed by changing < 20 lines of code in a way that is completely transparent and backward compatible for all users who don't care by just setting the default custom keybind to Esc like it already is. Really really frustrating.

[HennoT]

Meanwhile I found a workaround: join your own Zoom meeting with a browser (downside: cannot annotate on your screen while you are screen sharing)

Coincidentially, after I wrote this post, Teamviewer sales rep called me out of the blue and asked if he can be of any help to me. He introduced me to Teamviewer Classroom.

[maxedmands]

Please please please fix this, Zoom. 🙏

[fredness]

I find this incredibly annoying too.

IMO, the worst part of this ESC-global hotkey issue is this:

1. The global hotkey only works in one direction: to unhide the meeting controls.

2a. Zoom has an app-specific hotkey to hide and unhide controls (on mac is CTRL+OPT+ALT+H) -- why isn't this the global hotkey?

2b. It only works when Zoom is in focus.

If you use Keyboard Maestro on Mac (there are equivalent programs on Windows), you can create a global hotkey that will then trigger an action in zoom. I've configured CTRL+OPT+ALT+H in Keyboard Maestro to send that same command to zoom, allowing me to show and hide the controls from ANY app. While this doesn't solve the issue of ESC, it does ease the pain because as soon as the control bar shows up, you can hit another hotkey to hide it again. 

I have the same issue with Zoom's mute feature. I've used Keyboard Maestro to create a global hotkey which sends mute/unmute to zoom, allowing me to mute from anywhere.

Hopefully this helps 🙂

[rattrayalex]

Karabiner-Elements is another app similar to Keyboard Maestro. I asked whether anyone knows of a way to disable this behavior with that application here: https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/issues/3354

[whatever1]

Hey folks!

I've registered here specifically to post this. I think I've found a workaround for this heresy.

So, the idea is not to hide the controls with the zoom's built-in functionality but move the whole controls window as far as possible with whatever tool that lets you do so. In my case I used BetterTouchTool, but something like Hammerspoon or other tools should work too. Thankfully, this window has it's own very specific name (zoom share statusbar window), so you can easily find it and move it away.

Here's how my config for BTT looks like:
1. Bind the key mapping

2. Select action to do on key pressing

3. Configure action

4. Window name: zoom share statusbar window

5. Optional: reference point to count the offset from

6. The offset — I put 9999px

To bring it back, you can configure another shortcut and just move it back to the center of the screen (or where you need it to be).

Hope it helps!

[Liam6]

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@jimonthebarn wrote:

When I press vscomodapk.com it, it shows the meeting controls while I am sharing my screen. I use the escape key a lot while coding and it is annoying that I have to re-hide the meeting controls every time I hit Escape because it messes with my workflow.

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To disable the Escape key binding in Zoom, you can go to the Zoom settings and look for the "Hotkeys" option. From there, you can find the option to disable the Escape key binding and change it to a different key or remove the binding altogether. Additionally, on Windows and Linux, you can use the following command on your terminal: echo 'unbind Escape .zoomus.cfg This will unbind the escape key from zoom.

[pranavpagare]

Tried this but doesn't work on system, is there anything that I am missing or how to fix it

[rattrayalex]

@Liam6 I don't see any option to disable the Escape key binding in the "Keyboard Shortcuts" pane of the Zoom settings window (on macOS). Can you be more specific, perhaps with a screenshot?

[rattrayalex]

I was able to solve this with Hammerspoon (a free alternative to BetterTouchTool) thanks to @whatever1 's tips! See instructions at https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/454144/60586 

It allows using Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+H to toggle showing & hiding the menu bar by moving it offscreen, and Esc is never impacted.

[dmitriz]

If you're on mac you could also solve this using Applescript+Automator/Shortcuts.app, without installing any additional tools.

See this post https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/463067/325697

[Frank_TB]

Zoom Hot keys and keyboard shortcuts

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205683899-Hot-keys-and-keyboard-shortcuts 

[Luggnutt]

You will notice that the "esc" key to show floating meeting controls is NOT part of the customizable hot keys and keyboard shortcuts, so this is not helpful.

[eduardogspereir]

This `ESC` issue is extremely annoying. I hope they introduce a way to disable it in future updates. If zoom was not mandatory in my company, I would be already using something else.

[vdommes]

This issue is extremely annoying, I use ESC in IDEs frequently.
The best workaround I've found so far (on Windows) is to drag these controls to another desktop instead of hiding them.

[wewade]

This is horrible and zoom needs to do something about it! I have now followed @vdommes  example.
Configured an Ahk script that when I press hotkeys sends the window to a neighboring desktop (to the second desktop). And when pressed again, it returns the window to the main desktop (to the first desktop). The VD.ahk module from user FuPeiJiang, which can be found on github, helped me with this. I don't know if you can attach links. But I think by the above nickname you can find it.

[wewade]

Update. No, that didn't work for me after all. When the window is on the second desktop, it takes the focus and automatically switches to the second desktop...

[wewade]

A description of this problem is here:

https://superuser.com/questions/1027873/stop-automatic-switching-of-virtual-desktops-in-windows-10