Understanding the low-level mouse and keyboard hook (win32)

Question

I'm trying to capture global mouse and keyboard input.

LRESULT CALLBACK MouseHookProc(int nCode, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) {
  if (nCode >= 0) {
    if (wParam == WM_RBUTTONDOWN) printf("right mouse down\n");
    if (wParam == WM_RBUTTONUP) printf("right mouse up\n");
  }
  return CallNextHookEx(0, nCode, wParam, lParam);
}

HHOOK mousehook = SetWindowsHookEx(WH_MOUSE_LL, MouseHookProc, NULL, 0);
while(true) {
  MSG msg;
  if (PeekMessage(&msg,0,0,0,PM_REMOVE)) {
    printf("msg recvd\n");
    TranslateMessage(&msg);
    DispatchMessage(&msg);
  }
#ifdef TEST
  Sleep(50);
#endif
}

So everything works here, except if I #define TEST to put in the Sleep, the mouse becomes incredibly sluggish, as might be expected if I suddenly only allow the mouse to update 20 times a second. And without the sleep, I am pegging the CPU at 100%. But that's okay for now (that goes away if I use GetMessage).

Now as I understand it, the low-level hooks work by context-switching to the process which installed it, and then sending the process some kind of message to let it execute the hook callback. What confuses me a little, though, is why my program will never print "msg recvd", but it prints "right mouse down/up" whenever i click the right mouse button. This leads me to conclude that my MouseHookProc is being invoked during the PeekMessage call. It just happens to be some kind of special message and PeekMessage returns 0. But I still need to call PeekMessage or some equivalent.

Since my program needs to do a bunch of things, I clearly can't weigh down my message pumping loop (the one that calls PeekMessage) by calling another function that takes, say 50ms to return. How might I multithread my program to maintain mouse responsiveness while simultaneously doing a little heavy lifting? In a multithreaded win32 program, there is still just one message queue, right?

Update: After reading up on MS's documentation I think I know what the right thing for me to do is. I should just spawn a thread in my application which calls SetWindowsHookEx to register the mouse hook, and then sit around in its own message loop, and the system will take care of sending the mouse updates to this thread. It will be free to do whatever it wants within the MouseHookProc, and the rest of my application will run independently.

Answer 1

The problem is your message loop, it burns 100% CPU cycles because you use PeekMessage(). Windows knows how to keep the hook alive even if you don't poll for messages, use GetMessage() to solve your problem. Using Sleep(1) will solve your problem too but is not necessary here.

Why must SetWindowsHookEx be used with a windows message queue