Reinventing mouse buttons because laptop vendor made them as keyboard keys: remapping keyboard keys to mouse buttons
The unexpected challenge
Buying a laptop from an obscure Chinese brand is always a gamble. Sometimes, the risk pays off, and you get an incredible device at a lower cost. Other times, it’s a descent into madness. This was one of those times.
The device in question is a sleek, 7-inch pocket laptop — an engineering marvel of portability. Small enough to fit in a bag, light enough to carry anywhere, and running full Windows on an Intel x86 processor, it was the perfect companion for literally on-the-go productivity. Or so it seemed.
The first surprise was a pleasant one. A hidden USB-C port that the vendor had forgotten to make accessible through the laptop's case — easily remedied with a drill. And now instead of two USB ports the laptop became equipped with three USB ports — nice!
But the next revelation was far worse. The mouse buttons, seemingly functional, were in fact masquerading as numpad keys. A design flaw so absurd it felt intentional since the assigned numpad keys correspond with mouse keys when Windows accesibility mode for numpad is activated.
A War against the machine
Phantom mouse buttons
At first glance, everything looked normal. The laptop had a trackpad and two buttons beneath it. But pressing them didn't behave as expected. Double click? Ha-ha, not this time. Dragging and dropping files? Impossible. Right-clicking to access context menus? A disaster.
The vendor had taken a shortcut — assigning the left and right mouse buttons to numpad keys. Additionally, these keys could be activated only in accessibility mode, and only then Windows could interpret them as clicks. But in reality, they were stripped of essential functionality. This wasn't just an inconvenience; it made the laptop borderline unusable without an external mouse.
See the video below on how a simple left mouse button double click is not working. Here a user tries to open the disk content:
But an external mouse defeated the entire purpose of a pocket-sized laptop. The battle for real mouse buttons had begun.
The ideal solution that will never happen
The best fix was obvious: modify the laptop’s multicontroller firmware and UEFI BIOS firmware to redefine these buttons as actual mouse buttons. But this is dangerous territory.
To do so, one needed specialized hardware to extract and modify the firmware, advanced software tools to rewrite the code, and a deep understanding of embedded system programming. One wrong move, and the fully functioning laptop would be reduced to an unresponsive brick.
The risks were too high. A new strategy was needed.
The temporary fix: a virtual mouse
The laptop has a touchscreen. Maybe that could serve as a stopgap solution. But the finger is to coarse for small elements of Windows interface rendered on the 7-inch display. Luckily a software tool TouchMousePointer exists, a tool that turned part of the touchscreen into a virtual trackpad.
It worked — technically. But it was frustrating. The virtual trackpad consumed precious screen real estate, and the user’s hand often blocked the display.
Worse, the touchscreen has a fatal flaw of its own. If the laptop wasn’t shut down in the correct sequence, the touchscreen would mysteriously stop working. Probably because of the glitch in the multicontroller firmware.
The only way to fix it? A full power reset of the multicontroller. Ordinary reboot does not help, as the multicontroller is always powered on. You would need to brake any electrical supply to multicontroller. Which, in modern devices, meant physically disconnecting the battery. And that is possible only through disassembling the laptop.
Regardless of the touchscreen, the laptop has obtained everything you expect from the mouse: drag-and-drop and a context menu from right click. It is not very convenient to use for heavy work as it takes some space off this tiny screen and the hand blocks the content. But it allows the work to be done.
However, a search for a better solution continued.
The hunt for a real fix
The next idea was to remap the numpad keys at the OS level. If the multicontroller firmware couldn’t be changed, maybe Windows could be tricked into treating NUMPAD keys as real mouse buttons.
Capsicain
After testing multiple remapping tools, one stood out: Capsicain, a powerful driver-level remapper developed by a user named Cajhin. Unlike ordinary user-space apps, Capsicain had deep-level access to the system, making remaps appear as if they were native hardware inputs.
Capsicain basically could do anything with user input keys and OS would consider that as a hardware input. This would mean that at least in Windows the hardware mose buttons presses would be treated as real mouse buttons in any app and without performance issues.
Excited, the setup began. The buttons remap was configured:
[CONFIG_1]
OPTION ConfigName MouseKeysRewire
REWIRE NP5 {MOUSE1}
REWIRE APPS {MOUSE2}
But then — the cruelest twist. Original Capsicain does not support remapping to mouse buttons.
Imagine the disappointment, when it was found out that Capsicain does not support remapping into mouse keys. This app supports any remap, you can do even complex logic with remapping. But not simple remapping to mouse keys.
A ray of hope: the Capsicain fork
Just as hope began to wane, a discovery reignited the fight. Another user, nicknamed Dregu, asked the developer of the original Capsicain to implement mouse support and even provided the code of this modification. But apparently Dregu got no response, so he forked Capsicain and implemented mousebuttons support. This was it — the breakthrough!
An updated remapping configuration with enabled mouse remapping was immediately crafted:
[CONFIG_1]
OPTION ConfigName MouseKeysRewire
OPTION enableMouse
OPTION IncludeDeviceID ven_syna
REWIRE NP5 {MOUSE1}
REWIRE APPS {MOUSE2}
Except, once again, reality intervened. The fork worked, hardware mouse buttons have actually become software mouse buttons and this worked in all programs.
But the joy lasted until the firs reboot. Turned out that Capsicain required a real mouse to be used to remap numpad keys to mouse buttons. This was not immeditealy apparent because the Capsicain fork was configured while a real mouse was used. The app automatically fetched the mouse and started remapping to its buttons. However, freshly booted laptop does not have a HID-device that can be considered as a mouse, or it is simply unknown how to configure the app properly.
In order for Capsicain mouse buttons remapping to work after the laptop reboot, it was required to make one click with a real mouse connected to the laptop. This made the app to "see" the mouse. It was like being given the key to a locked door, only to find out you needed another key just to use it.
Since there is a lack of information on original Capsicain and especially on its fork, this solution is paused until more information can be obtained. The search for a daily usable solution continued.
A compromise that works: AutoHotKey
With all other options exhausted, there AutoHotKey app seemed like a ray of light through heavy dark clouds. AutoHotKey (AHK) operates in user space, meaning it lacks the deep system integration the Capsicain is capable of. But AHK could still get the job done, at least most of the time.
When the AHK is not enough due to limitations of running in a userspace, for example in a virtual machine, the fallback method of touchscreen and TouchMousePointer app kicks in. Of course, if the laptop was shutdown correctly and the touchscreen functions.
The AHK script was simple yet effective:
VK65:: LButton
VK0C:: LButton
VK01:: LButton
return
VK5D::
click Down right ;click right mouse button and hold
keywait, VK5D ; wait until key is released.
click Up right ; release right mouse button
return
With this script, the laptop’s hardware mouse buttons finally behaved like real mouse buttons — drag-and-drop worked, right-click menus opened, double click actually clicked and productivity was restored. For everyday use, it is good enough.
A battle won, a war unfinished
Was the problem truly solved? Not entirely. The best fix — rewriting the firmware — remains out of reach. There is simply no information and tools on this laptop.
But the laptop was finally usable on a daily basis. The tiny 7-inch machine, once a frustrating puzzle, is now a functional, portable workstation.
This journey into the depths of hardware quirks and software solutions had one clear lesson: in the world of obscure laptop brands, expect the unexpected.