Windows Hooks as non-admin

My most recent productivity application, Shortcutty, requires the ability to hook into Windows to capture keydown events. The purpose is to show (or hide) the application whenever the user pressed CTRL+~.

I easily got this to work using the Win32 API + PInvoke in my .NET application. But, on some applications such as my Visual Studio instance, the hook failed by unknown reasons.

After a bit of debugging and digging through online archives on the matter, I quickly realized that the issue was as simple as my application not having administrator rights. The latter is required if I want my application to interact with other applications having higher privileges.

Visual Studio, as it happens, was running with admin-rights - thus my application was unable to hook into it, obviously for security reasons. Generally: a non-administrator process cannot interact with a process having administrator rights. You cannot even drag and drop between applications.