Keyboard Shortcuts in Google Chrome / Chromium Extensions

Question

I've created a basic extension for Google Chrome to change the behavior of which tab is selected when you close a tab so that the selected tab is the last one you had selected instead of just the one before the tab you closed.

I want to add keyboard shortcuts, and I've found a way to do that using jquery and jquery hotkeys, but the problem I'm finding is that the keyboard shortcuts only work once a page is loaded. So for example, if you open a new tab without going anywhere, the shortcut keys don't work because the javascript only loads when a page is on the screen. Same problem if you have the extensions page open in a tab.

Does anyone know of a better way to do keyboard shortcuts in Chrome extensions? I've been looking through the extensions documentation, but I haven't found anything that looks promising.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's no way to hook into global hotkeys. The best you can do is add a window event keypress listener.

Source: a Chromium developer post on the chromium-extensions group.

Answer 2

Just as an update it's actually being developed now:

http://developer.chrome.com/trunk/apps/commands.html

Answer 3

Keyboard shortcuts are implemented with chrome.commands in Chrome 25 and above: developer.chrome.com/apps/commands.html.