Do you have a Protoarc XK03 bluetooth keyboard and play games? Well, I do. I've noticed that, unfortunately, the ESC key does not only double but triple duty. It acts as the tilde key, the backtick and ESC depending on the combination of keyboard presses you do. If you game on a laptop or the Lenovo Legion Go, like I do, you'll quickly realise that having ESC mapped as anything other than ESC makes it hard to exit some games or even pull up menus (I'm looking at you, Once Human). Well do I have the workaround for you! Strap in, this is going to get slightly wordy and just as slighly difficult.
What you'll need:
One of those bluetooth wireless keyboards (Using the ProtoArc XK03, https://www.protoarc.com/products/xk03-foldable-keyboard, myself but this method should work with most things)
Microsoft PowerToys (As of this guide, current version is 0.82.1. Check here for your preferred installed method https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/install)
I'll preface this set of directions with YMMV, I'm doing this on a Lenovo Legion Go but this should work generally on any Windows 10/11 machine.
First things first, install Microsoft PowerToys as it does all the heavy lifting for this workaround and launch it from the lovely icon that looks like:
Now PowerToys does a lot of pretty freaking amazing things but the section we're looking for to make this workaround happen is called Keyboard Manager. Pick it from the list on the left side of PowerToys.
For Keyboard Manager to do anything, we need to enable it. Slide the toggle to the right and that'll get this party started!
Now the meat and potatoes to this whole workaround is the Remap a Key section. You'll want to click on it to get things started.
So here we'll have PowerToys do the key translation. Click the left Select button, it'll pop up a dialog that lets you define the key you want to remap. You'll get this dialog box.
The key I needed to remap is the backtick key, which is the default character that the XK03 will output when pressed without any of the combination keys to change it to another one. So that was easy to get into that dialog box. I clicked ok and the first section looked like this.
We want PowerToys to send an ESC key. We'll leave the pulldown on Send Key/Shortcut and click the Select button. Now, for me, this is where it got complicated. In order for me to hit ESC on my XK03, i need to press FN+Shift+ESC to get the character to appear. If you attempt to do this in that dialog box, it will input both the Shift key and ESC, which is not what we want. So there are two ways around this, you can use another wired/wireless keyboard to just get the ESC key OR you can use Windows On Screen Keyboard (Win+Ctrl+O). Do that keycombination BEFORE you click the Select button to bring up the OSK otherwise it will input that into the dialog box. When you have the OSK on your screen, click the second Select button under To Send. Then click on the ESC key on your OSK or regular wired keyboard. Click the OK button when you're done. The To Send section should now look like this.
The entire remapped key section should look like this, if it does, click the OK button in the upper right of the window.
The one final step is that this fix doesn't seem to work when running PowerToys as a User, it needs to run with Administrative privileges. In PowerToys, we need to click the General gear near the top.
In the window that comes up, note the Restart PowerToys as Administrator button. It should be clickable but it's greyed out in this screenshot because I use it already. Click this button and it should restart PowerToys and be running as Admin and greyed out.
After all that, with PowerToys running i was able to effectively use the ESC key without a keycombination on my XK03. If I need to use the backtick for something, that's another story but you can turn Keyboard Manager off with the toggle if not gaming.
Hopefully this helped someone and happy gaming!