Ctrl space get eat by windows instead of passing to cygwin emacs

Question

I bind C-space to start selection but this is also the windows input method hotkey, so when never I press this under cygwin, it will eaten by the OS, is there any way to avoid this? how to work around this?

Answer 1

In principle you can tell Windows to let Emacs use that key when you are in Emacs.

For example, if you are on Windows XP then you can use w32-register-hot-key to let Emacs get that key, this way:

(w32-register-hot-key (kbd "C-SPC"))

But it is apparently the case that on Windows 7 (dunno about Vista or 8, but I'm guessing they too have the problem) w32-register-hot-key no longer has any effect. In this case I think you are out of luck --- you will need to change the hotkey that Windows uses for the input method.