c# - Catching Ctrl + C in a textbox

Question

Despite me working with C# (Windows Forms) for years, I'm having a brain fail moment, and can't for the life of me figure out how to catch a user typing Ctrl + C into a textbox.

My application is basically a terminal application, and I want Ctrl + C to send a (byte)3 to a serial port, rather than be the shortcut for Copy to Clipboard.

I've set the shortcuts enabled property to false on the textbox. Yet when the user hits Ctrl + C, the keypress event doesn't fire.

If I catch keydown, the event fires when the user presses Ctrl (that is, before they hit the C key).

It's probably something stupidly simple that I'm missing.

Answer 1

Go ahead and use the KeyDown event, but in that event check for both Ctrl and C, like so:

if (e.Control && e.KeyCode == Keys.C) {
    //...
    e.SuppressKeyPress = true;
}

Also, to prevent processing the keystroke by the underlying TextBox, set the SuppressKeyPress property to true as shown.