What would be the expected behavior for a window that hides itself upon keystroke

Question

This is a subjective question, but I need opinions.

I have a WinForms C# application whose window hides itself after a specific keystroke (Enter or Escape), with possible modifiers (e.g. Ctrl-Enter). When hiding on KeyDown or KeyPress, the other application that becomes active after my window hides itself receives the KeyUp event for that keystroke. Normally, it shouldn't affect that other application, but some of them out there react on KeyUp. For example, TweetDeck sends the message currently being edited on "Enter" KeyUp, even if it did not receive KeyDown/KeyPress.

So I thought, fine, I'll be a good citizen, I'll hide on KeyUp. But this doesn't feel right. If I only look for keys up, I'm doing what I blame others of doing! If I try to create an history of matching KeyDown/KeyUp, I'm over-complicating my code (modifiers generate their own key up).

What should I do? What should a well-implemented application do?

Answer 1

This is a hack, but you can set the state of your program to "pending hide" when receive the key down. And then when you get the key up for that sequence, reset the "pending state" and then hide.

Alternatively, can you just "eat" the key up off the message queue after you receive the key down?

I would not worry too much about applications handling key up rather than key down - like you point out - the only reason this is an issue is because your app changes active windows in the middle of a key down key up sequence. It is your responsibility (IMO) to also "eat" the key up messages. You can probably just handle the key up instead of key down with no adverse side effects.

EDIT

Thinking about this further - when doing alt-tab to go to a new window - the action does not happen until the key up. In the meantime it shows a window of possible apps to change to. You can do similar action and the behavior has a precedent.

So: On key down: Display window that indicates app will hide. on key up: hide window

This is "stateful" - you can only go into hiding if you received the key down and the key up - at least that is what I would do. 99.9999% (guess) not handling key down would be ok.

Answer 2

Well, I'd say "Don't worry about it, until it becomes a problem", but I guess it is a problem now....

In that case, I would hide on KeyPress (the expected user experience), but grab the focus until you get a KeyUp (or until a short timeout).

Answer 3

I can't think of any program that implements keyboard shortcuts on the KeyUp event. That standard was set a long time ago, with the Windows TranslateAccelerator() API function. It translates WM_KEYDOWN. Windows Forms implements the same behavior with ProcessCmdKey().

Sounds like you found a doozy. Does it handle Alt+F4 correctly?