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: