How to check for key being held down on startup in Java

Question

I'm trying to write a resolution selection dialog that pops up when a program first starts up. To prevent boring the user, I want to implement the fairly standard feature that you can turn off that dialog with a checkbox, but get it back by holding down the alt key at startup.

Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to ask java whether a given key is currently being pressed. You can only register to be informed of new key presses via a KeyListener, but that doesn't help if the keypress starts before the app launches.

Answer 1

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.JFrame;

public class LockingKeyDemo {
    static Toolkit kit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame();

        frame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
            public void windowActivated(WindowEvent e) {
                System.out.println("caps lock1 = "
                        + kit.getLockingKeyState(KeyEvent.VK_CAPS_LOCK));

                try {
                    Robot robot = new Robot();
                    robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
                    robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
                } catch (Exception e2) {
                    System.out.println(e2);
                }

                System.out.println("caps lock2 = "
                        + kit.getLockingKeyState(KeyEvent.VK_CAPS_LOCK));
            }
        });

        frame.addKeyListener(new KeyAdapter() {
            public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) {
                System.out.println("caps lock3 = "
                        + kit.getLockingKeyState(KeyEvent.VK_CAPS_LOCK));
            }
        });

        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        frame.setSize(200, 200);
        frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}

Answer 2

Well there are two types of key press detection: event based, and polling. If you poll the keyboard for KEY_PRESSED on startup (through a loop with a sleep.thread(timeInMs) constantly checking if your key is down), then you can detect if it's already pressed on startup.