Make it easy to bind to "?"

[jamesarosen]

The only way to bind to ? currently is to bind to "shift-slash," which only works on some keyboards. The trouble is that the only way to do a real binding to ? is to use onKeyPress, instead of onKeyUp, which doesn't work in other cases. This is a known problem area for nearly all keybinding libraries. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to do this elegantly.

[RobertWHurst]

I've been thinking about special keys like ?. I would have to redesign the library's key look up system to use a hidden input to sniff the character pressed. I'm not sure I will do this because it feels unclean.

[jamesarosen]

How about at least providing a couple of hooks so that users who want to do special key handling can?

[RobertWHurst]

Sure, that's easy enough. I'll likely add hooks the next release.

See issue #7

[jamesarosen]

I'll take a look at the hooks issue. You'll notice that when I raise the same issue on Keymaster, it went nowhere. This is not an easy thing to solve while keeping a low API profile.

[RobertWHurst]

Yea I saw you grabbed my Hooks branch. Is that kind of what your looking for?

[RobertWHurst]

Are you still looking for this @jamesarosen ?

[jamesarosen]

I'm definitely interested, but I haven't had a chance to investigate it myself.

[RobertWHurst]

Are you essentially looking for a way to bind a hook that lets you modify the active keys and combos arrays? Or are you looking for a way to modify the event object passed to event handlers?

[jamesarosen]

Ideally:

// This knows that `?` can't be bound with keydown and keyup,
// but must use keypress.
KeyboardJS.bind.key('?', function() { ... });

Just fine:

KeyboardJS.bind.keypress('?', function() { ... });

Also totally acceptable, though this seems like extra setup work that many people would have to do:

KeyboardJS.bind.parseEvents = function(combo, onKeyDown, onKeyUp) {
  if (combo === '?') { return { keypress: onKeyDown }; }
  return { keydown: onKeyDown, keyup: onKeyUp };
};
...
KeyboardJS.bind.key('?', function() { ... });

[RobertWHurst]

Ah... Ok I'm on it.

[RobertWHurst]

Fixed in v0.3.0. You can bind to ? off the bat with KeyboardJS.on('?', function() {});. If you still wish to add more macro keys use KeyboardJS.macro(keyCombo, [macrokey1, macrokey2, ...]);. Here's an example for '?'.

KeyboardJS.macro('shift + /', ['questionmark', '?']);

Note that '?' is already part of the US locale out of the box, but if it wasn't, the above would add it. Once a macro is added you can use it in you key combos like any other key name.

[Prinzhorn]

I assume a lot has changed since 2012. I'm trying to get "?" working with a German keyboard layout

This does not get me anywhere, neither "ß" nor "shift + ß" work.

keyboardJS._locale.bindKeyCode(223, ['ß']);
keyboardJS._locale.bindMacro('shift + ß', ['?']);

keyboardJS.bind('ß', console.log.bind(console, 'ß'));
keyboardJS.bind('shift + ?', console.log.bind(console, 'shift + ?'));
keyboardJS.bind('?', console.log.bind(console, '?'));

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_keyboard_layout

[daniel-wer]

@Prinzhorn In case you're still interested or for anyone else who stumbles upon this, the code snippet above did not work, because the keyCode for ß is actually 219.

Note, however, that there is a bug in the current keyboardJS version (see #164) which affects shortcuts using secondary key symbols (as ?) which is why only the first of the three bindings works.

[Prinzhorn]

@daniel-wer I'm currently not using KeyboardJS in any project, but I might be in the future. Thanks for looking into this! How did you come up with 219? See screenshot, this is me hitting the "ß" key on this very GitHub page.

[daniel-wer]

Unfortunately, keyboard events are a mess and the keyCode is different between keydown/keyup and keypress events, because they are different types of events. There is hope, though, in the form of UI events which should make all of this easier to work with.

If you use document.addEventListener("keyup", e => console.log(e.which, e.keyCode, e.key)) you will get keyCode 219 for ß which seems to be what keyboardJS is using. In another issue I read that @RobertWHurst plans to switch to UI events, but I'm not sure whether any work in this direction has been done yet.

[Prinzhorn]

If you use document.addEventListener("keyup", e => console.log(e.which, e.keyCode, e.key)) you will get keyCode 219 for ß

Oh happy day 😄

This is Firefox. In Chromium it's indeed 219.