How to close a WinForm with keyboard while a control has focus

Question

How can I close my C# WinForms program while there are some controls like treeviews, buttons and other stuff are present in it and they have focous and that could be they have same keyboard shortcut?

forexample in my treeview if I press ALT + ESC key, the nodes will be removed. but I want to be able by pressing ESC key the 'this.Close()' method to be called no matter if any control has focus.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Set KeyPreview property of your form to true. This allows you to handle keyboard message in form handlers before control handlers even if control has focus.

Answer 2

Maybe you could try this by overriding on the Form

protected override bool ProcessDialogKey(Keys keyData)
{
    if (keyData == Keys.Escape)
    {
        this.Close();
        return true;
    }
    else
        return base.ProcessDialogKey(keyData);
}

Answer 3

You need to set the form's KeyPreview property to true. This will enable the form to capture keypresses before they are passed on to the controls on it, which makes it possible for you to intercept them and pass them on if you want to, or do something else, like closing the form with your key combination.