Ensure all key events get sent to main window?

Question

Is there a way to ensure that all WM_KEYDOWN events find their way into my main window regardless of who has focus? this is mainly for global things such as Delete, and hotkeys such as CTRL A and CTRL S. The problem is if another control has focus, all of these stop working. Is there maybe a better way of doing this than putting them in my main window's WM_KEYDOWN event?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you do it in your message loop. At the exact location where a traditional message loop has the TranslateAccelerator() call. Which performs the same kind of operation, catching short-cut keystrokes and turning them into WM_COMMAND messages. A typical class library implements this with a "PreProcessMessage" method.