🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Croughton wrote:

> I don't want a dialog box, and I don't want anything to grab either
> space or the cursor keys.  Think of a terminal emulator, for instance,
> where the cursor keys need to send the appropriate codes to the other
> end.

The important point is that only the component with the current focus
gets sent the [space] keypress and only it gets a chance to respond to
it.

> So the answer is to always move the focus to something else which
> doesn't have that action but does have an OnKeyPress event, yes?

Yes.

> What would be suggested as a control which can receive do that?

When I wrote my editor (which was a couple of years ago now) I put a
TEdit on the form and hid it under a panel. Its Visible property has to
be True so that it can receive focus but you don't want the component
visible to the user so cover it up :)

I don't know that a TEdit is the best component - I just picked that.
Probably you just want whatever component consumes the least resources
but has OnEnter/OnExit and possibly OnKeyPress/OnKeyDown events.

I say possibly for the key events because all I have defined for the
TEdit are OnEntry and OnExit which take care of drawing a focus
rectangle around the edit window and setting a flag.

My form responds to OnKeyPress and OnKeyDown on behalf of the editor
and has Keypreview set to true. I'm not sure why I did this now but I
do remember that it was a solution to something. TBH my knowledge of
the VCL is based around "getting it working" rather than "coding it the
right way" :)

Whatever the merits of this strategy it is pretty simple and has worked
for me for a couple of years now :)
-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html