CAN'T collapse via "ctrl+." on Windows 10

Except surely Dynalist doesn’t need 3/5 users to change something - it’s 3/5 of your computers. As BigChungus said, if it affected most users there would be many hundreds of posts about it.

Those are not my computers, they are my friends’. If they use Dynalist, there will be two more posts.

Thanks for your suggestion. I opened your link in Chrome. The website is blank showing below

I see that and I can click that to collapse. But the hotkey “ctrl+.” doesn’t work(nothing happens). Yours is a Mac, do you have computers with Windows system. Please have a try.

I have Windows: “ctrl+.” works.

Did you do this in incognito mode? Did you try a different browser?

Ctrl+. works on my windows computers as well.

If you press ctrl+. on this website do you see them both stay green? https://keyboardchecker.com/

I opened your link and ctrl+. can turn to green shown as below:


I have tried Dynalist.exe, Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Internet Explorer. The picture I sent you to show the Dynalist page was in Chrome in incognito mode. The results are the same. (except Internet Explorer, because any keyboard operation doesn’t work in IE, but I won’t use IE so I am ok with that.)

As I said, I used spy++ to monitor the keyboard. when I press “ctrl+.”, there are three messages, and all of their module names are Dynalist shown as below. I think that means Dynalist could catch the hotkey input, but on the Dynalist page, there is nothing happened.

That clarifies it dramatically. I could be wrong, but this suggests to me there must be another program that has nothing to do with the web that is stealing Ctrl+Period.

Or cancel that idea:

Wait, OEM_PERIOD is the period on the number pad. That is the wrong key. You need the period on the main keyboard area.

What’s the correct period called? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/virtual-key-codes

Finally, I think I find the true reason.


As the picture shows: the key difference between “ctrl+.” and “ctrl+shift+.” is there is only KEYUP for OEM_PERIOD, while there should be KEPUP and KEYDOWN for OEM_PERIOD like “ctrl+shift+.” does.
To check if there is something wrong with my “.” on the main keyboard area, I press “.” individually and the result is shown as below, which is correct with KEYUP and KEYDOWN.

So the problem comes to it seems when I press “ctrl”, then the KEYDOWN event for ‘.’ couldn’t be caught, and this is the only comb that would go wrong.
Finally, I tried the comb in other places, and the result is shown below that there is only KEYUP for the ‘.’ without KEYDOWN.

That shows this is truly my computer’s problem. I apologize for that I thought this was Dynalist’s bug before, I knew so little about the keyboard things.
So next, I think as long as figuring that why the KEYDOWN for ‘.’ couldn’t be caught when “ctrl” is pressed and solve this. The comb will work in Dynalist.

Good detective work.

The weirdest thing is when I use the online keyboardchecker to check the comb, the KEYDOWN event for “.” could be caught.
While in any other place, it couldn’t.

OEM_PERIOD seems to be on the main keyboard.
VK_DECIMAL seems to be on the number pad.

Finally sovled.
The comb “ctrl+.” is occupied by the Microsoft Chinese input method for changing punctuation in Chinese or in English … I closed that and it works.
Thank you guys for helping me solve this embarrassing problem. This has wasted too much time of yours and mine. I am sorry for that.

I am corrected. VK_OEM_PERIOD is the normal period. VK_DECIMAL is the number pad period.

Aha. So my initial guess that “something else” was intercepting the key was correct. Chinese IME stole it.

Good news is: we now have a reference for the next person who has this problem.

@LELE Thanks for your diligent investigation. I was having the same problem as you, but on MacOS. The similarity between your situation and mine is that I switch between language input ( English/Japanese/Korean). Your solution (adding “shift” to the key combination) works for me! The normal “cmd + .” doesn’t work, but “cmd + shift” + ." does.