Window Capture

Capture will work with most apps, but has limitations.

Dialog boxes and drop-down menus

On apps using older frameworks, dialog boxes and drop-down menus may not be shown. There is no fix or workaround.

The captured window doesn’t update when it’s not visible (e.g. when in-game)

Some applications choose not to update when the window is fully covered by other windows, including full-screen games; OpenKneeboard can not change this behavior. You can ask the developer of the application to remove this optimization, or, some apps may have workarounds:

Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers

Change your browser shortcut to add --disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows after the exe. If there is a quote after the .exe, add a space after the quote then the extra text, otherwise, just add a space then the extra text. Close your browser and restart.

Discord

Close Discord fully, including from the system tray.

If your Discord shortcut is to Discord’s Update.exe, change your shortcut to add --process-start-args=--disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows after the exe, before --processStart=Discord.exe after Update.exe; If there is a quote after Update.exe, add a space after the quote then the extra text, otherwise, just add a space then the extra text.

If your Discord shortcut is directly to Discord.exe, treat it as a Chromium browser.

These steps may work for other Electron-based apps.

Other apps

You can try making it so that some portion of the app window is always visible on a monitor - and don’t run the game full-screen. If this doesn’t work or isn’t practical for you, contact the developer of the other app for support; you may want to link them to this FAQ entry.

Cursor

While OpenKneeboard’s own cursor will move, it will not move the Windows mouse cursor, as Windows only supports mouse interaction with the active window.

Mouse/tablet forwarding

  • make sure that mouse/tablet forwarding is enabled in the tab settings
  • make sure the window being captured is not running as administrator

If mouse/tablet forwarding does not work for you with a specific app or causes any other issues, it is simply incompatible. There is no configuration, no troubleshooting, or anything else you can do to fix it, unless you are the app developer, and familiar with Win32 and your framework.

Apps, frameworks, and Windows itself try very hard to make it so mouse movement only affects active window; sometimes, despite OpenKneeboards’ best efforts, they succeed.

These issues are very time consuming, and there are too many apps/frameworks for me to investigate them. There is no need to ask, or to open bug reports/feature requests.

Specific apps with compatibility issues

  • Windows Calculator (UWP)
  • Map drag-and-drop in LittleNavMap
  • DCSTheWay