Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition

Keyboard Basics

You’ve probably already surmised how a Windows program gets keyboard input: Keyboard input is delivered to your program’s window procedures in the form of messages. Indeed, when first learning about messages, the keyboard is an obvious example of the type of information that messages might deliver to applications.

There are eight different messages that Windows uses to indicate various keyboard events. This may seem like a lot, but (as we’ll see) your program can safely ignore at least half of them. Also, in most cases, the keyboard information encoded in these messages is probably more than your program needs. Part of the job of handling the keyboard is knowing which messages are important and which are not.

Ignoring the Keyboard ...