jQuery Hotkeys provides easy, human-friendly handling for keyboard input.

You can:

• Bind to key events for specific key combinations
• Read which keys triggered a key event
• Check if specific keys are down
• Get the list of keys that are currently down
• Get the list of keys that were most recently pressed (and released)

The first of these was adapted and improved from the original jQuery.hotkeys. The rest are added by this implementation.

Usage

Bind the keydown, keypress, or keyup events to an element:

$(selector).keypress('ctrl+a down', function(event) {});
// OR
$(selector).on('keypress', 'ctrl+a down', function(event) {});

Separate key combinations that should trigger the callback with spaces. In the examples above, the callback would fire if ctrl+a or down was pressed. In the event callback, event.keyPressed holds the combination that actually triggered the callback.

You can specify keys in combination with the control keys: alt, ctrl, meta, and shift. If you use multiple control keys in a combination, specify them in alphabetical order.

Instead of binding to key events, you can also just call jQuery.hotkeys.areKeysDown() to determine whether a set of keys is currently being pressed:

// true if either the A key or both the B and C keys are currently pressed
jQuery.hotkeys.areKeysDown('a b+c');
// true only if the A key or both the B and C keys are currently pressed,
// and no other keys are pressed
jQuery.hotkeys.areKeysDown(['a', 'b+c']);

Additionally, you can examine the list of currently pressed keys yourself in jQuery.hotkeys.keysDown. This is useful if you want to bind to key events for all keys since event.keyPressed does not exist in this scenario:

// After every keypress, output the keys that are still held down.
jQuery(selector).keypress(function(event) {
    jQuery(this).append('<p>' + jQuery.hotkeys.keysDown.join(' ') + '</p>');
});

If you only care about keys that were pressed (and released) instead of which keys are being held down, you can call jQuery.hotkeys.lastKeyPressed() (which returns a string containing the last key that was pressed) or examine an array of the last 5 keys pressed in jQuery.hotkeys.lastKeysPressed.

Notes

This project is dual licensed under the MIT or GPLv2 licenses. jQuery is licensed under the MIT license.

All key combinations are case-insensitive ("CTrL+A" is the same as "ctrl+a").

Hotkeys aren't tracked when an element that accepts text input has focus unless you explicitly bind the hotkeys directly to the element. This helps avoid conflicts with normal user typing. (Elements that accept text input include <textarea>, <select>, most <input> types, and any element with contentEditable="true" set.)

Compatibility

Should work with jQuery 1.4.2 and newer, although new revisions will only be tested with jQuery 2.2 and newer. If you use early versions of jQuery, use .bind() instead of .on().

Should work with all the major browsers on all major operating systems, including mobile devices. Versions of this script have been tested on Windows, Mac, and Linux on IE6+, Firefox 1.5+, Chrome 0.2+, Safari 3+, and Opera 9+. However, new revisions of this script will only be tested on the last two major versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome.

Meta and hyper keys don't register on keyup in any browser. Neither key registers in Chrome on keypress. Opera doesn't register the meta key at all.

NOTE: Firefox is the only major browser that will reliably let you override all key shortcuts built into the browser. This won't be a problem for most applications, but you should avoid binding to combinations like ctrl+Q and alt+F4 because most browsers will still react to those by closing the window.

Credits

• Isaac Sukin wrote this revision
• John Resig, Tzury Bar Yochay, and Binny V A wrote earlier revisions
• Changes were integrated from kwillia and kevingorski and rpocklin