Check if a key is down?

Question

Is there a way to detect if a key is currently down in JavaScript?

I know about the "keydown" event, but that's not what I need. Some time AFTER the key is pressed, I want to be able to detect if it is still pressed down.

P. S. The biggest issue seems to be that after some period of time the key begins to repeat, firing off keydown and keyup events like a fiend. Hopefully there is just a simple isKeyDown(key) function, but if not then this issue will need to be overcome / worked around.

Answer 1

Look at this answer, and use onkeyup and onkeydown. Here is more specific info about those events.

Answer 2

Other people have asked this kind of question before (though I don't see any obvious dupes here right now).

I think the answer is that the keydown event (and its twin keyup) are all the info you get. Repeating is wired pretty firmly into the operating system, and an application program doesn't get much of an opportunity to query the BIOS for the actual state of the key.

What you can do, and perhaps have to if you need to get this working, is to programmatically de-bounce the key. Essentially, you can evaluate keydown and keyup yourself but ignore a keyupevent if it takes place too quickly after the last keydown... or essentially, you should delay your response to keyup long enough to be sure there's not another keydown event following with something like 0.25 seconds of the keyup.

This would involve using a timer activity, and recording the millisecond times for previous events. I can't say it's a very appealing solution, but...

Answer 3

I don't believe there is anything like an isKeyDown function, but you could right your own.

Basically, create an array thats length is the number of keys you want to monitor. Then using the documents/pages/controls keyUp and keyDown events, update the array with that keys state.

Then write a function that checks if a certain key is down and returns a bool.

var keyEnum = { W_Key:0, A_Key:1, S_Key:2, D_Key:3 };
var keyArray = new Array(4);

function onKeyDown()
{
    // Detect which key was pressed
    if( key == 'w' )
        keyArray[keyEnum.W_Key] = true;
    // Repeat for each key you care about...
}

function onKeyUp()
{
    // Detect which key was released
    if( key == 'w' )
        keyArray[keyEnum.W_Key] = false;
    // Repeat for each key you care about...
}

function isKeyDown(key)
{
    return keyArray[key];
}

That should accomplish what you want.

Answer 4

Is there a way to detect if a key is currently down in JavaScript?

Nope. The only possibility is monitoring each keyup and keydown and remembering.

after some period of time the key begins to repeat, firing off keydown and keyup events like a fiend.

It shouldn't. You'll definitely get keypress repeating, and in many browsers you'll also get repeated keydown, but if keyup repeats, it's a bug.

Unfortunately it is not a completely unheard-of bug: on Linux, Chromium, and Firefox (when it is being run under GTK+, which it is in popular distros such as Ubuntu) both generate repeating keyup-keypress-keydown sequences for held keys, which are impossible to distinguish from someone hammering the key really fast.