How to bind keydown events to specific keys

The data-on attribute allows us to attach an event listener to any element, and run an expression whenever the event is triggered. We can use this to listen for keydown events and run an expression only when a specific key or key combination is pressed.

Goal #

Our goal is to show an alert whenever the user presses the Enter key, or a combination of the Ctrl and L keys.

Steps #

The data-on-keydown attribute will listen for keydown events only on the element on which it is placed, by default. We can listen for events on the window element to capture keydown events globally, by adding the __window modifier.

1<div data-on-keydown__window="alert('Key pressed')"></div>

This will show an alert whenever the user presses any key. To limit the alert to only the Enter key, we can use the evt.key property to check the key that was pressed. The evt variable represents the event object and is always available in the expression.

1<div data-on-keydown__window="evt.key === 'Enter' && alert('Key pressed')"></div>

We can add the Ctrl and L key combination by checking the evt.ctrlKey and evt.key properties.

1<div data-on-keydown__window="evt.ctrlKey && evt.key === 'l' && alert('Key pressed')"></div>

Finally, we can combine the two expressions to show an alert whenever the user presses the Enter key, or the Ctrl and L keys.

1<div data-on-keydown__window="(evt.key === 'Enter' || (evt.ctrlKey && evt.key === 'l')) && alert('Key pressed')"></div>

Sometimes, we may want to prevent the default behavior of the keydown event, such as submitting a form when the Enter key is pressed. We can do this by calling evt.preventDefault().

1<div data-on-keydown__window="evt.key === 'Enter' && (evt.preventDefault(), alert('Key pressed'))"></div>

Conclusion #

The evt variable is always available in data-on attribute expressions. In the case of the keydown event, which is a KeyboardEvent, we can perform actions conditionally, based on any of the event’s properties.