`windows-reactor` Support for keyboard handling controls

[fourtf]

Suggestion

It would be cool if it was possible to create a component in Reactor that can take keyboard focus and handle keyboard events (KeyEvent and CharacterEvent). This allows creating custom input components, such as a text editor or terminal.

I am building a terminal emulator and would like to have a custom rendered component with mouse and keyboard handling. The user would input into it so character input is important. Most of this already works today (rendering via canvas and mouse), but support for custom keyboard handling/focusing seems to be lacking right now.

PS. MouseWheel event would also be great for this

[fourtf]

Claude create a proof of concept for me and I'm using them in my prototype right now. Maybe it's interesting for you to better gauge the scope of what I'm requesting: https://github.com/fourtf/windows-rs/compare/5a86ef5de8bb97246385935845cebca57a7175c1..cb7c8266dcc28527181812875306eede23294aa8

[kennykerr]

Reactor already supports pointer press, move, release, enter, exit, and capture through Border; see the reactor-pointer-position, reactor-pointer-tracking, and reactor-pointer-resize samples. It also supports programmatic focus through ElementRef::request_focus for focus-capable controls, as demonstrated by reactor-form.

Are you mostly asking about raw keyboard input? Could you describe the smallest scenario that current Reactor prevents, ideally with a short example using the existing API? An assortment of agent-generated features/gaps are not very easy for me to handle.

[fourtf]

Yep, not being able to manually handle keyboard events is the pain point here (I mentioned this in the issue description). For me personally, I often end up writing applications where the main component of the application handles input manually. Since the keyboard is such a basic input method I would consider it important to give the developer access to its full potential. As soon as someone wants to implement a custom input component they will miss key-down or character input callbacks.

I have created a sample application here as you've requested. It's a simple terminal that takes user input manually (using my patched version of the window crate) and then handles the character input manually:

Repo: https://github.com/fourtf/reactor-key-example
Main.rs: https://github.com/fourtf/reactor-key-example/blob/master/src/main.rs
Screenshot: