How to simply get if a key is pushed?

[ChazZeromus]

I used the keyboard listener but it only takes in keystrokes in the usual linear intervals. You know, like when you're typing. Is there any simple way to just grab whether a key is held down?

[Fubarable]

In what context? Swing? AWT? SWT? None of the above?

[ChazZeromus]

Well I came up with a solution using swing, I used a key listener on my main JApplet class but it doesn't detect any keystrokes until i click on the window of the app. I always have to click on the already focused window. And it turns out that my previous solution wasn't using a listener but a dispatcher, so that explained the keystroke-like registering.

[Fubarable]

Have you looked at using key bindings? These can work even if the component that has the binding doesn't have focus but is held by the window with focus.

[ChazZeromus]

Not at all, how would I do that using my JApplet or Jframe class?

[Fubarable]

Here's an example program that shows use of key bindings. In this program pressing one of the arrow keys together with alt will start a Swing Timer that will keep firing (appending a String in a JTextArea) until the alt-arrow key has been released.

I'm no expert in key binding, so please take this program as only a suggestion for ideas, not as gospel. Also, since for unknown reasons the forum doesn't allow posting of code with key binding in it, I created a Jar file with source code and then changed the extension to zip and uploaded it. Please let me know if I can answer any questions about this.

Best of luck

[ChazZeromus]

Well I already came up with a sugerpacket solution by creating a keylistener and adding that single listener to JApplet and JFrame. It works, well I'd say.

As for the example, how exactly do you perform the example? I looked at the code and it looks like a timer's suppose to trigger or something causing some text to appear in one of the edit controls? I'm not sure.