Windows Hotkeys

An opinionated, lightweight crate to handle system-wide hotkeys on windows

The windows-hotkeys crate abstracts and handles all interactions with the winapi, including registering hotkeys and handling the events. A hotkey manager instance is used to register key combinations together with easy callbacks.

Features

• Full highlevel abstraction over the winapi functions and events
• Easy to use
• Register hotkeys with Key + Modifier
• Register hotkeys with Key + Modifier and require additional keys to be pressed at the same time
• Set rust callback functions or closures that are executed on hotkey trigger
• High level rust abstractions over the Virtual Keys (VK_* constants) and Modifier Keys (MOD_* constants)
• Create VKeys (Virtual Keys) and ModKeys (Modifier Keys) from key name strings

How to use

1. Create a HotkeyManager instance
2. Register a hokey by specifying a VKey and one or more ModKeys, together with a callback
3. Run the event loop to react to the incomming hotkey triggers

use windows_hotkeys::keys::{ModKey, VKey};
use windows_hotkeys::HotkeyManager;

fn main() {
    let mut hkm = HotkeyManager::new();

    hkm.register(VKey::A, &[ModKey::Alt], || {
        println!("Hotkey ALT + A was pressed");
    })
    .unwrap();

    hkm.event_loop();
}

Current limitations

Threading

Due to limitations in the windows API, hotkey events can only be received and unregistered on the same thread as they were initially registered. This means that a HotkeyManager instance can't be moved between threads.

Using windows-hotkeys with multithreading is still possible, but the HotkeyManager must be created and used on the same thread.

A possible solution to this limitation might be to have each HotkeyManager run it's own thread in the backgroud that is used to register, unregister and listen for hotkeys. This might be implemented in the future and would provide a more ergonomic way to use the HotkeyManager in general.