Keyboard shortcut to minimize Remote Desktop

CTRL + ALT + BREAK will minimize the maximized window to the host PC.

Ctrl + Alt + Home will bring focus to your local machine (at least in Win 8). Ctrl + Alt + Home then Win will open the windows menu on your local machine.

With virtual machine use, I often have multiple RDP sessions open, and switch by Ctrl + Alt + Home then Win + T then arrow keys to pick the RDP session I want to be in.

This bugged me for the longest time as well.

Initial attempts to solve it with AutoHotkey failed, because the Remote Desktop client installs a keyboard hook and swallows all input.

I finally discovered that the Caps Lock key gets passed through to the local system.

So, this AutoHotkey script will do the trick, making Ctrl+Shift+CapsLock minimize Remote Desktop:

#IfWinActive ahk_class TscShellContainerClass
  ^+CapsLock::
    ; Need a short sleep here for focus to restore properly.
    Sleep 50
    WinMinimize
  return
#IfWinActive

Corrected version that works for me:

#IfWinActive ahk_class TSSHELLWND
  ^Capslock::           ; Ctrl+Caps Lock (couldn't make Ctrl+Shift+Caps Lock work for some reason
    ; Need a short sleep here for focus to restore properly.
    Sleep 50
    WinMinimize A    ; need A to specify Active window
    ;MsgBox, Received Remote Desktop minimize hotkey    ; uncomment for debugging
  return
#IfWinActive