Detect Keystrokes In Different Window with Batch - batch-file

Question

Fair people of stack overflow! My question today is how to detect key presses, but not in the batch window itself. I have this code already:
choice /c KEY /n /t 5 /d d
if %errorlevel%==1 goto restofcode
This only works if you select the batch window itself. What I need is a way, in batch (or some other language) to make it detect if you press Ctrl+W outside of the actual batch command line itself.
There is a program called GS Auto-Clicker and it starts clicking your mouse when you press a key. I want something like this as far as detecting what key you press.

Answer 1

Okie doke, here's an example demonstrating GetAsyncKeyState() using a Batch + PowerShell hybrid script. Save it with a .bat extension. Hopefully the inline comments sufficiently explain how it works. See the MSDN page on GetAsyncKeyState() for full details on that function's expected arguments and return value type.
Edit: Fixed bugs. Original answer would trigger if the user pressed and released W then pressed Ctrl. It seems my PowerShell 2.0 interpreter has some buggy behavior. Setting variables to the GetAsyncKeyState() return value on each loop iteration seems to fix it. I also made the key definitions a little less neck-beardy by leveraging the System.Windows.Forms.Keys collection, and removed the possibility that the "recently pressed" bit would trigger a false positive for "currently pressed".
<# : batch portion (begins PowerShell multiline comment block)
#echo off & setlocal
set /P "=Waiting for ctrl-W... "<NUL
rem # re-launch self with PowerShell interpreter
powershell -noprofile "iex (${%~f0} | out-string)"
echo Pressed. Toodles.
goto :EOF
: end batch / begin PowerShell chimera #>
# import GetAsyncKeyState()
Add-Type user32_dll #'
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
public static extern short GetAsyncKeyState(int vKey);
'# -namespace System
# for Keys object constants
Add-Type -As System.Windows.Forms
function keyPressed($key) {
return [user32_dll]::GetAsyncKeyState([Windows.Forms.Keys]::$key) -band 32768
}
while ($true) {
$ctrl = keyPressed "ControlKey"
$W = keyPressed "W"
if ($ctrl -and $W) { break }
start-sleep -milliseconds 40
}
$Host.UI.RawUI.FlushInputBuffer()