How to register a global hotkey for your application in C#

How to register a global hotkey for your application in C#

Register a hotkey for your application that can be triggered even if your form is minimized and does not have focus. More »

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How to register a global hotkey for your application in C#

If you are looking for a way to set a global hotkey for your C# application that can be used without your form having focus I have created a decently commentated example for you below that you can use.

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31 Responses to How to register a global hotkey for your application in C#

  1. Vimal says:

    How to register hotkey combination like ctrl + A + P

  2. Gab Beaudin says:

    Thanks my friend , it’s working perfectly and directly what i wanted !!!

  3. orecchionebruno says:

    Hello, I’m a novice, I tried your code and I have a question.

    How can I grab “CTRL + A + A”?

    I’ll be happy to waiti for your help!

  4. VX7 says:

    Hi, Coolmine, this program raise an exception for me saying that, unable to find an entry point named RegisterHotkey in dll user32.dll what should I do ?

  5. Ahmad says:

    hey nice code but i have a problem . What if i want to register 2 modifiers and a hot key ? example (alt+ shift + a) .
    Any Solution please ?

  6. JBerman says:

    Thank you for the post, it helped to make my hot keys work.

  7. Ruben Vuittonet says:

    This also did not work for me in Windows 10.

    • CooLMinE says:

      I’ve tested the above code on Windows 10 v1709 and it works just fine. If you are having issues I suggest sharing your project so people can take a look.

  8. prasaath says:

    Not working when the application is not activated (out of focus). how to solve the issue?

  9. Abdul Qadir Kapadia says:

    I have one issue:

    Thanks for this superb post, I tried this it works with windows server 2008 but when I run that program in windows 7 it’s getting in indefinite loop.

    Please help !!!

  10. Kay Lee says:

    Hello, found interesting and trying but..is this also able to apply to WPF ?
    I’m writing a WPF application..It’s great but hope also available to WPF !

  11. Michael S Cowan says:

    This does not seem to work in Windows 10 .. IS 0x0312 still the valid message code for hotkey?

    • CooLMinE says:

      Yes, it’s still valid.

      I’ve tried it myself just to make sure since I’m running Windows 10 as well. Seems to be working as expected.

  12. z says:

    Really useful! Thanks a lot!

  13. Delores says:

    Hello this is somewhat of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding experience so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!

  14. Excel Developer says:

    Thanks, helped me to register a hotkey for an Excel 2013 Application level add-in (since there is no built event to do this as far as I know so have to listen to the messages). Only needed to change hWnd to:

    RegisterHotKey(new IntPtr(Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.Hwnd), …

    Word of advice though for Excel developers, the handle is different for every workbook you open (not the same as Excel 2010), so on your workbook activate event you need to load that workbooks handle.

  15. Ralph Freshour says:

    I’m new to C# coding. How do I create this app? I created an empty project in my VS 2013 C# IDE but there is no form to paste your code into. I don’t know what kind of form to create.

    I created a new project, WinForm, but that code looks so different from your code I don’t know what kind of structure you are using…WinForm? WPF?

    I need this capability in my C# WinForm but I have no idea how to get your code into my code to make it work.

  16. cosmickinect says:

    Had to personally thank you for this article, it saved me soo much trouble :) thanks!

  17. joe black says:

    Nice post, I use a different method to check the hotkey if you register multiple.
    In your above code I would check the hotkey ID when the message is received like this:

  18. Athena says:

    Hey there! I just wish to give you a huge thumbs up for the excellent information you have right here on this post. I am returning to your blog for more soon.

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