Using your Surface Pen as a clicker outside of PowerPoint
TL;DR
- Download Windows PowerToys
- Goto Keyboard-Manager and create a new Key Combination
- Press the pen short once and set it to the
right arrow
key, to go to the next slide. - Press the pen for a long period and set it to
left arrow
key, to go back one slide. - Set your preferred PDF viewer as the destination app so your default keybindings will still work outside of presenting.
- Profit.
I use impressive to present my PDF slides.
Story
I already have a Surface Pen and Laptop that I don’t use anymore
because it is glued shut and I would need more RAM.
Anyways, I am now creating slides with beamer
and need to present a PDF file.
I already knew you could use the pen to switch slides in PowerPoint,
so there should be a way to override the default shortcuts of the pen when using another app.
I was about to google for a library to be able to change the keybindings.
Then I remembered PowerToys and the ability to overwrite keybindings and to my surprise it worked.
Don’t make the mistake of only overwriting one key.
Apparently when clicking on your pen, it is a key combination (Win (Left) + F19
).
If you only overwrite F19
to left arrow
then your application windows will get moved.