How to check for modifier key presses (Windows Forms .NET)

As the user types keys into your application, you can monitor for pressed modifier keys such as the SHIFT , ALT , and CTRL . When a modifier key is pressed in combination with other keys or even a mouse click, your application can respond appropriately. For example, pressing the S key may cause an «s» to appear on the screen. If the keys CTRL+S are pressed, instead, the current document may be saved.

The Desktop Guide documentation for .NET 5 (and .NET Core) is under construction.

If you handle the KeyDown event, the KeyEventArgs.Modifiers property received by the event handler specifies which modifier keys are pressed. Also, the KeyEventArgs.KeyData property specifies the character that was pressed along with any modifier keys combined with a bitwise OR.

If you’re handling the KeyPress event or a mouse event, the event handler doesn’t receive this information. Use the ModifierKeys property of the Control class to detect a key modifier. In either case, you must perform a bitwise AND of the appropriate Keys value and the value you’re testing. The Keys enumeration offers variations of each modifier key, so it’s important that you do the bitwise AND check with the correct value.

For example, the SHIFT key is represented by the following key values:

The correct value to test SHIFT as a modifier key is Keys.Shift. Similarly, to test for CTRL and ALT as modifiers you should use the Keys.Control and Keys.Alt values, respectively.

Detect modifier key

Detect if a modifier key is pressed by comparing the ModifierKeys property and the Keys enumeration value with a bitwise AND operator.

The following code example shows how to determine whether the SHIFT key is pressed within the KeyPress and KeyDown event handlers.

Free Show Pressed Keys 0.0.1

fathom

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fathom submitted a new resource:

Show Pressed Keys

I wanted a way to be able to show my movement keys as well as clicks on my mouse, but I was unable to find anything to my liking. I decided to create something, and I thought others may find it useful.

Show Pressed Keys — Overlay for WASD and Mouse

I wanted a way to be able to show my movement keys as well as clicks on my mouse, but I was unable to find anything to my liking. I decided to create something, and I thought others may find it useful.

There is an individual script for the mouse and keyboard.

1. Run one of the scripts
2. Drag the window to your desired location
3. Select ‘Save Position’ from the tray menu.
4. Use Monitor Capture in OBS and cover the window

Additional mouse skins.

Maspers

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nikolarN

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How do i run this ?

What do i need to start the .ahk files ?

Sapiens

nikolarN

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fathom

New Member

nikolarN

New Member

fathom

New Member

nikolarN

New Member

Well, that goes ahead and solves it. Put it in the notes for people having problems in the future.

Thank you so much, it’ll be a great adition to my stream! 🙂

frankbackes

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fathom

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Frank, I am actually in the process of re-writing this using Node.js, so it can be used with the CLR Browser plugin. This way, you won’t have to do a screen capture. Unfortunately, the way I wrote this current project is not very customization friendly.

The new project will be using html, css, and javascript, so customization will be more user-friendly. I plan to put the new project up on github quite soon.

If you want a solution that is ready for what you describe, check out Noh Board http://sourceforge.net/projects/nohboard/

EDIT: Also, because you can use web fonts, your example of photoshop tutorial would work great if there is some sort of icon font (icomoon, font-awesome, etc) out there with all of the button icons.

Windows show pressed keys

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Answered by:

Question

How can i capture key press in Windows Forms not from a Control?
I want the user to press any key any where in the Form and display the keypress in label
like if you write in the text box

I knew that i have to setup ( KeyPreview to true in the Form1 ) and use

private void Form1_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
<

to capture the key press.

But my problem is that i did not get the value correctly in the label

Pressing number 5 in keyboard will give
1. If using e.KeyCode
===========================
label1.Text = e.KeyCode.ToString();

NumKey will give ===>> NumPad5
MainKey will give ===>> D5

2. If using e.KeyValue
==========================
label1.Text = e.KeyValue.ToString();

NumKey will give ===>>101
MainKey will give ===>>53

3. If using e.KeyData
==========================
label1.Text = e.KeyData.ToString();

NumKey will give ===>> NumPad5
MainKey will give ===>> D5

Show Pressed Keyboard Keys and Mouse Clicks on Screen

If you are creating a video tutorial or giving a presentation, you may need to display your keyboard key press and mouse click activity to the viewers. To assist you, here are some free, portable utilities:

KeyPose – Shows Keystroke

KeyPose shows every keyboard key presses and shortcuts on the screen, on a semi-transparent overlay, as you type. If you don’t press any key for some milliseconds, the horizontal overlay is automatically hidden.

KeyPose works straight out of the box and has no settings option.
Download: KeyPose

ShowMouseClick – Shows Mouse click

ShowMouseClick is a tool that does exactly what its name says – show where you clicked on the screen, with a colored dot. Only left mouse clicks are displayed.

You can customize the dot color and its visibility duration after a click.
Download: ShowMouseClick

Tools to display Keystroke and Mouse click

ShowOff

ShowOff shows off every key stroke and mouse click on a white box in the top-left corner (default) of the screen. This box stays on top of all other windows and you can drag it anywhere on your screen.

ShowOff box is customizable – you can change its background color, size, transparency, and the content’s font color and font size.

ShowOff’s settings are stored in a INI file, which is saved in the same folder as the executable. If you find any key stroke is not recorded or if you don’t want to display any key, simply add/remove its entry from the INI file. Software should not be running while you are editing the file.
Download: ShowOff

OSD Hotkey

OSD Hotkey also shows keystroke and mouse click activities in a small window. The unique feature of this tool is that you can lock logging recording to a specific program, which means key press and mouse click performed only on the chosen program is shown on the screen. To activate this feature, first choose a program window by right-clicking on the software tray icon in the notification area, select “Set class for class control”, and left click on the program you want to show hotkeys for. Next, right-click on tray icon and click on “class control” from tray menu. To release the program, simply re-click on “class control”.

The display window is customizable. You can resize it, change transparency level, text background color and font color.

This program is written in AutoHotkey. You can download both the EXE and source code from the download page.
Download: OSD Hotkey

Windows utility to render which key I am pressing on-screen [closed]

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Closed 4 years ago .

I’m giving training to a large group of people remotely and will be covering a number of application shortcut keys.

I’ve seen MousePose’s on-screen display of keystrokes; is there a similar product for Windows?

The other features of MousePose (fancy mouse pointers, etc.) aren’t really useful to me, just the OSD of key presses.

9 Answers 9

KeyPosé is a free alternative to MousePosé for Windows. You can see it in action in the screencast.

Here is a sample screenshot:

I highly recommend Carnac The Magnificent. It’s nicely executed, nicely designed and open sourced on GitHub project that really solves this problem well.

A keyboard logging and presentation utility for presentations, screencasts, and to help you become a better keyboard user.

There is a fork with visualization of mouse input here: https://github.com/bfritscher/carnac/releases

I would like to share my tool — keycastow.

I’ve written an AutoHotkey_L script for this purpose.

To run it, use AutoHotkey_L (direct dl), it’s FOSS. Also, with AutoHotkey you can compile script to EXE (simply Ahk2Exe.exe /in DisplayPressedKeyOnScreen.ahk /out DisplayPressedKeyOnScreen.exe ).

It can display pressed keys OSD-like or standard Tool-tip near mouse cursor. Also, it displays mouse button clicks and wheel scrolling.

(note that frame & blurring is done for illustration purposes, the script itself only displays text w/o any disturbances)