Systems and methods may provide for detecting an event on a computing device having an embedded keyboard with a default mapping of keys to functions and disabling a first subset of keys on the embedded keyboard in response to the event. Additionally, a second subset of keys on the embedded keyboard may be re-mapped to one or more different functions if an application running on the computing device supports keyboard re-mapping. In one example, re-mapping the second subset of keys includes grouping two or more keys in the second subset into a common function.