CODEWITHSUNDEEP
winapiwindows-shell
Sabuncu
Sabuncu

Reputation: 5264

Which Windows API controls filename editing?

When you press F2 to edit a filename in Windows Shell, there is a limited set of editing keys that is understood - e.g. CTRL+Arrow Keys, Home, End, CTRL+X. For example, when you type CTRL+Right Arrow, the cursor will stop right after a dash, but will not stop at a period. Are these actions customizable, and if so, how?

Any additional information not directly related but which you feel might help the topic will also be appreciated.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 395

Answers (3)

Tergiver
Tergiver

Reputation: 14517

By "Windows Shell" I assume you mean Windows Explorer, but the answer is likely the same no matter what program you are talking about.

Explorer simply creates an EDIT control and moves it into position. The editing behavior comes from this stock system control, plus whatever additional logic Explorer adds to its own instance of it.

While you can easily alter the behavior of an EDIT control that belongs to a thread in your own process, doing so in another process requires a global hook. We will stipulate that you understand the amount of work involved in doing a global hook correctly, and which will function in both x86 and x64 environments.

You cannot directly interfere with the behavior of an EDIT control in another process with WH_CALLWNDPROC, but you can use WH_CALLWNDPROCRET to observe keyboard messages, check that the window is and EDIT control, check that the EDIT control belongs to Explorer, and then knowing precicesly how the EDIT control responded to that keyboard event, do something additional like backing up to that period.

Or maybe you could use a WH_CBT hook to monitor HCBT_CREATEWND and subclass the EDIT control each time it gets created.

The effort is probably not worth the benefit.

Upvotes: 2

casablanca
casablanca

Reputation: 70701

You can set a custom word-break procedure for your edit control using EM_SETWORDBREAKPROC; EditWordBreakProc is the corresponding callback function that the OS calls when it needs to find where a word break occurs.

From the docs:

Either a multiline or a single-line edit control might call this function when the user presses arrow keys in combination with the CTRL key to move the caret to the next word or previous word.

The key combinations themselves are not directly customizable, and for a good reason -- so that the user experience is uniform across all applications. Of course, you could subclass the edit control and handle keyboard messages yourself but I guess that's not the point here.

Upvotes: 5

Hans Passant
Hans Passant

Reputation: 941447

The Windows version matters, but in general this behavior is baked into SysListView32, the native list view control. No, keyboard handling is hard-baked. Subclassing the control is technically possible, just not practical since it lives inside Explorer.exe. And having no clue where the caret is located inside the label, there are no messages for it.

Upvotes: 2

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