by Dave Healy - Independent Developer

I’ve recently had occasion to create a large, read-only text box which a user might want to scroll through.

Setting the text box’s ScrollBars property appropriately is fine for mouse users, but I wanted keyboard users to be able to achieve the same effect. The following sub-routine does the job:

  Sub txtView_KeyDown (Keycode As Integer, Shift As Integer)
  On Error Resume Next
                                        ' Keycodes are as follows:
                                        ' 33 = PageUp
                                        ' 34 = PageDown
                                        ' 35 = End
                                        ' 36 = Home
                                        ' 37 = Left arrow
                                        ' 38 = Up arrow
                                        ' 39 = Right arrow
                                        ' 40 = Down arrow
  If Keycode >=33 And Keycode <=40 Then
    KeyOK = True
  Else
    KeyOK = False
  End If
  If Err Then MsgBox ("Error" & Err & "in VIEWER, txtView_KeyDown:"& Error$(Err))
  End Sub

The text box's KeyPress routines testsKeyOK, registering the key press only if KeyOK is true. KeyPress can't sample the codes directly because they're not ASCII. This routine also allows CTRL-HOME and CTRL-END to function as you'd expect in a Microsoft application. Its only limitation is that PageUp isn't registered at all if the cursor can't actually move up a whole "page".

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