How to obtain the owner of a Hotkey?

[Exit]

After searching the forum and MSDN, I believe that is it not possible to obtain the owner of a hotkey.

To enhance my _Hotkey() function (see >here), I would like to show the owner of a hotkey, if Hotkeyset() fails.

I believe to the power of the developers to make the impossible possible. 

I prepared a skeleton script to start with.

Just the last function _HotkeyOwner() needs some tweaks.

;~ Hotkey checker
#include <WinAPI.au3>

_HotKey("{ESC}")
_HotKey("{F12}")
Func _HotKey($hotkey = "")
    Switch @HotKeyPressed
        Case "{ESC}"
            Exit MsgBox(64 + 262144, Default, "Exit", 1)
        Case "{F12}"
            Beep()
        Case Else
            If Not IsDeclared("hotkey") Then Return MsgBox(16 + 262144, Default, "No CASE statement defined for hotkey " & @HotKeyPressed)
            If HotKeySet($hotkey, "_Hotkey") = 0 Then Return MsgBox(16 + 262144, Default, "Hotkey " & $hotkey & " invalid or set by another application." & @LF & "Error: " & @error & " Extented: " & @extended & @LF & "Lasterror: " & _WinAPI_GetLastErrorMessage() & @LF & _HotkeyOwner($hotkey))
    EndSwitch
EndFunc   ;==>_HotKey

While Sleep(100) ; here should be your application.
WEnd ; meanwhile, here is a dummy loop.

Func _HotkeyOwner($hotkey)
    Return "No Hotkeyowner detected for hotkey " & $hotkey
EndFunc   ;==>_HotkeyOwner

Please confirm, that there is no solution     or better, ... show me the impossible.

Thanks Exit

[BrewManNH]

Explain what you mean by the owner of a hotkey. Some so-called "hotkeys" aren't really hotkeys at all, their just windows messages that the application intercepts and processes, such as CTRL-P and CTRL-S.

[Exit]

As you already pointed out, so-called "hotkeys" aren't really hotkeys, but application accelerators. See GUISetAccelerators() in the help file.

Real hotkeys are those who are set by Hotkeyset(). And only those are subject of my thread.

I want to detect, which process prevents Hotkeyset() to acquire the hotkey.

This might be a system process (like F12), but in most cases, it is another script or executable.

And it would be a good information for the user, to know this other process.

Please excuse my wording, my native language is German.

But anyway, please  show me the impossible.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Exit

[JohnOne]

I don't see anywhere where you are attempting to determine this "hotkey owner"

[BrewManNH]

It's not possible from everything I've read to find out what application might have a certain hotkey assigned to it. Windows doesn't give you that information.

[JohnOne]

There is however a list of all the hotkeys which windows uses.

On the internet somewhere.

cannot remember where.

[Mat]

Well I guess if you really wanted to, you could use a global hook for all windows on the desktop, hooking their message loops to check if they are receiving a hotkey while you send it. You could even remove it from the queue so that the window didn't process it.

There has to be a list somewhere in memory, though it is buried deep, and this is windows so nothing is going to be easy to find.

[Exit]

As I stated in my first post:  "After searching the forum and MSDN, I believe that is it not possible to obtain the owner of a hotkey." , I hoped that one of you would prove me the contrary and amend the last function in my code _HotkeyOwner() . But the guru didn't turned up till now.

[Ascend4nt]

That's a shame that this info isn't available.  I did a quick search on sysinternals and nirsoft to see if they had anything of the sort, but nothing came up.  There's an old utility Ethervane ActiveHotkeys that can look to see if a hotkey is used by other programs, but it too doesn't locate what implemented it.  The global Atom table sometimes is linked to the hotkeys, but that too doesn't seem to have any information on ownership.  I suppose what Mat suggests could be one approach, though its quite brute-force.

[Exit]

I searched the atom-table  with the atom-table-monitor , but no luck.

I found no entries pertaining to the hotkeys,  

[BrewManNH]

Why do you need/want to know the "owner" of a certain hotkey? Just because you want to know, or is there a real reason for knowing it? If you're creating hotkeys, you're overwriting the ones that already exist anyways, and you can't reassign them once you're done.

[Exit]

Why do you need/want to know the "owner" of a certain hotkey? Just because you want to know, or is there a real reason for knowing it? If you're creating hotkeys, you're overwriting the ones that already exist anyways, and you can't reassign them once you're done.

 

 "If you're creating hotkeys, you're overwriting the ones that already exist."  Partially wrong!

You can overwrite them, if you created them. If they where created by another process, your creation fails.

And when the creation fails, I want to inform the user, which process is involved. Then he can close this process and try again.

Btw, I pointed this out in post #1 and #3.

"anyways, and you can't reassign them once you're done". Also wrong!

You can reassign them, if you created them.

But ,perhaps another user has the inspiration.

[KaFu]

This is the closest I could find, though it seems to utilize ASM and driver stuff ...

http://www.wasm.ru/wault/article/show/gui_subsystem

[Exit]

Я не говорю по-русски

[BrewManNH]

Google, or Bing translate the page, Bing did a far better job when I translated it than Google did.

[Ascend4nt]

That russian page discusses device-level kernel operations, which is a little insane.  And who knows what the 64-bit equivalent code would be and if that stuff is even portable to other O/S versions.  I also found another page where someone tried to tackle the same problem, but it all winds up being guesswork in the end..

[Richard Robertson]

It sounds like the only reliable method is actually hooking window messages, simulating the key press, and removing the message from a queue when you catch it.

Not even sure if you can do that in only AutoIt.

[trancexx]

You need dll for that, so no.