c# - Why are some textboxes not accepting Control + A shortcut to select all by default

Question

I have found a few textboxes here and there in my program that accepts Control+A shortcut to select the entire text "by default" with "no coding".

I don't know what additional information I have to give here to enable it for all of them, as I find absolutely no difference between these textboxes. They are all simple dragged and dropped textboxes.

Note: I'm not talking about this piece of code:

if (e.Control && e.KeyCode == Keys.A)
{
    textBox1.SelectAll();
}

I want selection by default... or is there anyway to change textbox property so that textboxes accept all default windows shortcuts?

Everything else (Control + Z, Control + X, Control + C, Control + V) works by default! Why not Control + A?

Update: The text boxes that accepted Ctrl+A by default were masked textboxes, not the regular one. And at that point I was with .NET 2.0. But I guess the original problem was something else, as I can see Ctrl+A working fine by default in .NET 2.0 code.

Answer 1

You might be looking for the ShortcutsEnabled property. Setting it to true would allow your text boxes to implement the Ctrl+A shortcut (among others). From the documentation:

Use the ShortcutsEnabled property to enable or disable the following shortcut key combinations:

• CTRL+Z

• CTRL+E

• CTRL+C

• CTRL+Y

• CTRL+X

• CTRL+BACKSPACE

• CTRL+V

• CTRL+DELETE

• CTRL+A

• SHIFT+DELETE

• CTRL+L

• SHIFT+INSERT

• CTRL+R

However, the documentation states:

The TextBox control does not support the CTRL+A shortcut key when the Multiline property value is true.

You will probably have to use another subclass of TextBoxBase, such as RichTextBox, for that to work.