NOTE: this code has been superceded by the version at the new site.

Overview
If you've ever tried to pick a keyboard accelerator for the menu items Back and Next in your application, you might have discovered a limitation in VB's ability to set up accelerators. IE offers some sensibly chosen keyboard accelerators for its Back, Next, Home shortcuts, as shown in the image above, but you won't be able to set them up in standard VB!

Another thing that can be annoying is that you cannot set up accelerators at run-time, only at design time. This means if you are loading custom menus then you won't be able to give them an accelerator. Well, you could try using a Registered HotKey, but remember that HotKeys are system-wide in scope, so you might end up triggering the key when you don't want to! And what if you have two applications with the same accelerator?


The vbAccelerator Accelerator Control
This control uses a Windows Hook to intercept keyboard messages whilst your application is running. Because it affects all windows within your application's thread, it doesn't matter which window has focus, the accelerator will also be detected. (So beware! Don't, for example, set up an accelerator on the 'A' key...)

Using the control is simple. Just drop one control on your application's main form and then call the AddAccelerator method with the key code, shift constants added together and a string property to identify the accelerator. Then whenever the accelerator is pressed the control's Accelerator event will fire, passing you the index of the accelerator in the control's array. You can get the string key property which identifies the accelerator from the index with the Key property.

To indicate that an accelerator is associated with a menu, you can set the caption of the menu to show the accelerator. To do this, just set the caption property of the menu to the regular caption plus a tab plus the text for the accelerator. So for example to set up a Home menu item with Alt+Home as the displayed accelerator, do this:

   mnu.Caption = "&Home Page" & vbTab & "Alt+Home"

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