Question

I have a small form, which comes up when I press a button in a Windows Forms application.

I want to be able to close the form by pressing the escape key. How could I do this? I am not sure of the event to use. form_closing?

Answer 1

You can set a property on the form to do this for you if you have a button on the form that closes the form already.

Set the CancelButton property of the form to that button.

Gets or sets the button control that is clicked when the user presses the Esc key.

If you don’t have a cancel button then you’ll need to add a KeyDown handler and check for the Esc key in that:

private void Form_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Escape)
    {
        this.Close();
    }
}

You will also have to set the KeyPreview property to true.

Gets or sets a value indicating whether the form will receive key events before the event is passed to the control that has focus.

However, as Gargo points out in his answer this will mean that pressing Esc to abort an edit on a control in the dialog will also have the effect of closing the dialog. To avoid that override the ProcessDialogKey method as follows:

protected override bool ProcessDialogKey(Keys keyData)
{
    if (Form.ModifierKeys == Keys.None && keyData == Keys.Escape)
    {
        this.Close();
        return true;
    }
    return base.ProcessDialogKey(keyData);
}