WinAPI - How to print text to edit control?

Question

REVISION 1:

I can't get a good grip on WinAPI's AllocConsole(); function. I either need option one, or option 2. It's better to have both though :). Thanks in advance. Here's option 1:

Make a console window from a WinAPI program when BUTTON_1 is clicked. The console needs to be able to output text (like cout ), and sleep/delay text from being printed. (Something like Sleep() )

Option 2:

Instead of printing text to the console window like in option 1, the program prints text to a user-inaccessible editbox. This also needs to be able to use something like Sleep() to delay text from being printed.

Answer 1

Assuming you're appending strings to an edit control, perhaps to record TTY-style output from some lengthy process:

Use the EM_SETSEL message to select the range just after the last character, then use EM_REPLACESEL to replace it with the string to append. The edit control scrolls when this happens. For example, if hEdit is the handle for the edit control, and str the 0-terminated string to append:

int idx=GetWindowTextLength(hEdit);
SendMessage(hEdit,EM_SETSEL,idx,idx);

SendMessage(hEdit,EM_REPLACESEL,0,(LPARAM)str);

This is the process recommended by this Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/109550

Answer 2

My suggestions is to use

SendMessage(hEditBox,EM_SETSEL,-2,-2);

to move the caret to the end of text in the edit control. It saves you one function call and it works.

About the Sleep related part, I think it would be better to use timers, that should work without any problems.

Ex.

// somewhere in the code where you decide to make changes to the edit control
...
SetTimer(hWnd,TIMER_ID,1000,0);  // TIMER_ID is arbitrary, the delay is set to 1000 ms
...

// main procedure message 
switch (uMsg) {
   ...
   case WM_TIMER:
      SendMessage(hEditBox,EM_SETSEL,-2,-2);
      SendMessage(hEditBox,EM_REPLACESEL,0,buffer);
      KillTimer(hWnds,TIMER_ID);
   ...
}

You may want to put a bit more work into this, for instance to reuse the SetTimer call.