Question

I want to make some custom hot keys where in any program I can bring up different programs with certain key combinations. I researched how to do hooks and was given this example.

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nShowCmd) {
    // Set windows hook
    HHOOK keyboardHook = SetWindowsHookEx(
        WH_KEYBOARD_LL,
        keyboardHookProc,
        hInstance,
        0);
    MessageBox(NULL, "Press OK to stop hot keys", "Information", MB_OK);
    return 0;
}

Rather than a message box, as I want this to run in the background, I tried using loops but nothing I have tried successfully behaves like the messagebox. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Don’t use windows hooks unless you absolutely need to. In your case you can install a hotkey by calling the RegisterHotKey function, which is much simpler since you don’t need to develop interprocess communication (that is between your DLL with the hook procedure and your main app).