Why can’t I catch a keyboard press?

Targets Windows
1

I surely must be doing something awfully wrong. But what?
This piece of code in a button press handler

If Keyboard.AltKey Or Keyboard.OptionKey Or Keyboard.ControlKey Then
  Break
Else
  ConnectButton.Enabled = True
  ConnectButton.Press
End If

will break into the debugger on macOS once one of the keys is held.
It will trigger the button press on Windows, no matter what. I used to use the Async methods but that did not work as well.

2

I’m not able to reproduce your results on Windows 11 using the latest Xojo build.
What version of Xojo are you using? What version of Windows? Is this inside a VM?

Sample project: keys.xojo_xml_project (3.5 KB)

3

This works for me too, with Xojo 2025r1.1 on a MacBook and a Parallels Windows 10 VM as target.
This does not influence the fact that the keys are not working as expected in this app. They are in a different one.
Just found this.

EDIT: As a mitigation, AsyncKeyDown(hex) does work. So I’ll add a space depress as fallback.

4

VMs, Parallels especially, screw with the keys. There’s nothing for Xojo to fix, it’s a problem with Parallels.

Here’s a recent ticket about these keys where the user finds the VM is the problem:
#79147 - Keyboard methods for Ctrl, Shift and Alt keys (sync and async versions) aren’t updated while the user does nothing.

1 Like
5

Try this in Parallels:

Ignore the apps being called “games”.

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6

Thanks! That was the setting I would not have expected to be suitable for my purposes :smiley:

1 Like