Get Shift/ Ctrl/ Alt Key state

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This code determines the state of shift, alt and ctrl keys.
You can do this while your application is initializing, in order to do something or not to do something.

Keywords: keystate, keyboard state

Note: (Thanks to Mary Atkins-Shington for reporting this)

GetKeyState and GetAsyncKeyState only work with Win95, Win98, NT4, Terminal Server and Windows 2000. But on WinME it always returns zero. These two functions are simply skipped by Millenium Edition!

Official explanation from Microsoft:

Intentionally disabled.
It didn't work all that well on some newer hardware, and worked less well with the passage of time, so it was fully disabled in ME.

	// Tests whether the high order bit of the given word is set. function HighOrderBitSet (theWord: Word): Boolean; const HighOrderBit = 15; type BitSet = set of 0..15; begin HighOrderBitSet := (HighOrderBit in BitSet(theWord)); end; .. begin .. AltKeyDown := HighOrderBitSet(Word(GetKeyState(VK_MENU))); CtrlKeyDown := HighOrderBitSet(Word(GetKeyState(VK_CONTROL))); ShiftKeyDown := HighOrderBitSet(Word(GetKeyState(VK_SHIFT))); LeftShiftKeyDown := HighOrderBitSet(Word(GetKeyState(VK_LSHIFT))); // other VK's: // VK_LSHIFT VK_RSHIFT // VK_LCONTROL VK_RCONTROL // VK_LMENU VK_RMENU end.

Comments:

2008-07-21, 02:28:40

anonymous from South Africa

Thanks...works well

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