Disabling window switching under windows

SDL Development
1

Is there anyway I can disable alt+tab, and the silly extended ‘windows’ keys
so that the only way to switch back to windows from a fullscreen sdl app is
to ctrl+alt+del?

2

Hi,

I’ve done alot of research into this for an internet
cafe program I’m doing. There are various ways of doing
this. I don’t know if SDL provides functions to do this,
I don’t think it does. The first strategy is to do a system
wide “hook” into the keyboard and mouse events. Your hook
function becomes the first handler so you can filter out
keyboard keys out so they are ignored. The next strategy
blocks the keyboard using the MS VC BlockInput() function.
This is roughly like unplugging the keyboard. 99% of the
keyboard keys will not work. ctrl-alt-del still functions.
I wouldn’t use this function, as its very unpredictable
especially when used with threads. The third strategy is
to register hot keys for each of the key combos you want
to disable, this works but its a bit tricky. The final
strategy, I’m still looking at, is using the
SystemParametersInfo() & SPI_SETSCREENSAVERRUNNING, this
disables the ALT-TAB, etc. You can read about it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q226/3/59.ASP

The problem of course is that you need to know a bit about
MS VC. I wrote several functions, while researching, for
locking the keyboard & mouse. If your interested I could
send code. I used swig so I could access them in python. I
was thinking of doing an sourceforge project to provide
a library to allow keyboard/mouse disabling on win32
systems, I just haven’t got round to it yet. Anyway I hope
the above is of some use, feel free to email me if you have
other questions, all the best,

om> ----- Original Message -----

From: Robert Clayton [mailto:trinitychaos50@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 10:14 AM
To: sdl at libsdl.org
Subject: [SDL] Disabling window switching under windows

Is there anyway I can disable alt+tab, and the silly extended ‘windows’ keys
so that the only way to switch back to windows from a fullscreen sdl app is
to ctrl+alt+del?

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