Gmail seems to capture all keyboard events. Any way to go around that?

Question

I'm writing a Chrome extension that launches a script with a keyboard shortcut. It works fine on most pages but I realized that on Gmail it doesn't: it seems that all keyboard events are captured by Gmail and are not bubbled up to my function.

I have a content script (in Chrome extension this is added to any page you want) that has (simplified of course):

document.body.addEventListener('keypress', myFunction, true);
function myFunction(event) {
    console.log("yay, Gmail didn't let me down!");
}

But actually, Gmail does let me down. I know that the script is loaded. I tried different variations of window.addEventListener and other event types to no avail.

Does anybody know of a way to bypass this? I tried to see if GreaseMonkey script could do it, that brought me here: http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey/ but that didn't help me.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could try a process of redirection:

if (document.body.onkeypress) {
    // add as event listener instead
    var kpfunc = document.body.onkeypress;
    document.body.addEventListener('keypress', kpfunc, true);
}

Answer 2

I don't know the inner workings of GMail's keyboard event capturing, but I recently wrote a simple keyboard shortcut navigator (so I don't have to use the mouse to click links) for Chrome.

It's not an extension, but a user/Greasemonkey script, but it's triggered by typing comma (,) twice, and it works in GMail.

Maybe it'll help you to look at the source. You can download it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/68609