Type of device* : Pen and 2-in-1 laptop
Brand and version of the device: Lenovo Active Pen 2, Lenovo Yoga 6
System** : Win 11
Hi. I have mapped my Active Pen 2’s buttons to ctrl, intending to use them for the eyedropper tool while using the brush. No joy. When I hold the button, it shows a little ‘ctrl’ tooltip on the canvas, but NOT the eydropper icon, and when I touch down it just draws a line as if ctrl was not held. So I can’t use the laptop flipped over as I intended. I can only sit it open and use its physical keyboard while painting, which gets uncomfortable.
I’ve used Wacom tablets for decades but I’m new to 2-in-1 and WIn ink. So, my process for mapping the key was Lenovo pen settings > bottom barrel button> ‘keystrokes’> Begin capture> {Ctrl}> Accept.
If I understood the “Lenovo Pen Button Configuration Guide” correctly, then you didn’t do anything wrong, maybe except for the fact that you think you can map the pen’s buttons to keystrokes. This doesn’t even seem to be possible with the “Lenovo Pen Settings App (or the Wacom Pen App)” mentioned in it. Unfortunately, this is a big problem with almost all 2-in-1 devices, that the vendors of these convertibles don’t offer a decent pen configuration driver that would allow you to map the pen buttons to keyboard keys. You will have to make do with the mappings offered by your driver software, just like many others before you, sorry.
But maybe I’m too tired to understand Lenovo’s manual at the moment, and you can freely assign the buttons as you like.
I’m going to sleep now, it’s 3:45am here, and I’m falling asleep.
If you paint a stroke on the canvas and lift the stylus - then press and hold that stylus button and press the ‘Z’ key, does the stroke disappear?
If it does, that would seem to show that it sent Ctrl+Z (Undo) to krita and that the ‘ctrl’ tooltip is a system level hint to let you know that you’re pressing the ‘ctrl’ button on the stylus but it doesn’t actually send a Ctrl key signal to the application until a key is also pressed, then it sends Ctrl+key.
That would be something to look for in the Windows Ink settings or the Lenovo stylus settings.
Hi, thanks for the answer. I looked into that and I think you’re right. The ‘modifier’ mapping was a feature, which was removed about 3 years ago for no good reason and the ‘keystrokes’ mapping thinks it knows better than you when you just put a modifier in, by itself (it ignores it).
I jsut pent an hour with Lenovo support and honestly if they were actively trying to send people mad they could hardly do it better. Apparently my lenovo pen is not compatible with my lenovo laptop even though it ships with the same model of pen and all the features work as intended. The website is so carefully set up to get you the right drivers, but the search function is broken so you can’t find any of them, it keeps asking for the serial number then rejects all of the 10 numbers on the box, including the one the support guy used to find it wasn’t compatible, then also refused to confirm which one it was because I’d been transferred to US support by another agent despite being in the UK…
…and so on. Wow. I mean at least there was no hold music.
So, google doesn’t seem to show any workarounds, nor can I access the old drivers. You say the wacom pen app can’t map to it either? So no point in buying a wacom pen then. Is it possible to change the key binding in krita so that one of the barrel button bindings it does recognise can be mapped to that?
Thanks again for your help, all who’ve answered.
Edit: best workaround I can find (assuming no one has an actual fix and someone else searches this topic) is to map one barrel button to b and one to p, so you can manually click between tools. It’s much less fluid than my usual workflow, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I had taken the information with the “Wacom Pen App” from the “lenovo_pen_button_config_guide.pdf” and suspect this is identical to the Lenovo app, this would not be an unusual procedure of OEM equipment to relabel an app.
I’m not quite sure¹ if you got the driver or not, but if your notebook should have “Yoga 6-13ALC6” as exact name, then you will probably find your driver here, here is the link for direct download, to which it says: “This package provides Wacom Pen Driver and is supported on Yoga 6-13ALC6 and running the following Operating Systems: Windows 11 (64-bit)”. Maybe it is the driver you are looking for.
Michelist
¹ English is getting harder and harder for me, for whatever reason.
This is a solution rather than a question, but my previous topic was closed.
Pertains to: Lenovo or Wacom stylus pens (active pen 2, digital pen 2) on windows 2-in-1 tablets.
Problem: “modifier” is no longer an option when assigning barrel buttons. “Keystrokes” will accept a modifier as the selected key, but then the pen will ignore the keystroke because it’s expecting a modifer AND a key instead of just a modifier. Whoever thought this was a good idea has never used a pen tablet. It was in fact removed from the driver, which used to support mapping modifiers by themselves.
Solution: map a barrel button to “keystrokes” in Lenovo pen settings or Wacom pen (they’re the same programme with different names). Map the button to the modifier you want followed by one you don’t e.g. I wanted to map ‘Ctrl’ so I mapped ‘Ctrl’ ‘Shift’.
For whatever reason, when you use the barrel button, the pen then plays back the first modifier and ignores the second. So, FINALLY after buying 2 separate pens and spending probably about 6-7 hours with Lenovo support and reasearching aimlessly on the internet, I just started trying random stuff ni case it worked, and it did! I can now use a colour picker while painting without having to flip the keyboard back around and come out fo tablet mode or set one button to ‘p’ and the other to ‘b’, which was my previous (unsatisfactory) solution.
Hello