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#About jQuery Hotkeys is a plug-in that lets you easily add and remove handlers for keyboard events anywhere in your code supporting almost any key combination.

This plugin is based off of the plugin by Tzury Bar Yochay: jQuery.hotkeys

The syntax is as follows:

$(expression).bind(types.keys, handler);
$(expression).unbind(types.keys, handler);

$(document).bind('keydown.ctrl_a', fn);

// e.g. replace '$' sign with 'EUR'
$('input.foo').bind('keyup.$', function(){
  this.value = this.value.replace('$', 'EUR');
});

Types

Supported types are 'keydown', 'keyup' and 'keypress'

Notes

If you want to use more than one modifiers (e.g. ctrl+alt+z) you should define them by an alphabetical order e.g. alt_ctrl_z

Hotkeys aren't tracked if you're inside of an input element (unless you explicitly bind the hotkey directly to the input). This helps to avoid conflict with normal user typing.

All keys that have special meaning in RegExp strings (\.+*?^$[](){}/'#) can't be removed by using the namespaced event until this jQuery bug get's fixed: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/11458 the colon (.) will never work (even if bug is fixed) since it is used to separate multiple namespaces. To remove them you will need to remove events to the whole event type:

// won't work
$('#foo').unbind('keyup.$');
$('#foo').unbind('keyup.+');

//will work
$('#foo').unbind('keyup');
$('#foo').unbind('keyup.a');
$('#foo').unbind('keyup.ctrl_s');

jQuery Compatibility

Works with jQuery 1.4.2 and newer.

It known to be working with all the major browsers on all available platforms (Win/Mac/Linux)

Addendum

Firefox is the most liberal one in the manner of letting you capture all short-cuts even those that are built-in in the browser such as Ctrl_t for new tab, or Ctrl_a for selecting all text. You can always bubble them up to the browser by returning true in your handler.

Others, (IE) either let you handle built-in short-cuts, but will add their functionality after your code has executed. Or (Opera/Safari) will not pass those events to the DOM at all.

So, if you bind Ctrl_Q or Alt_F4 and your Safari/Opera window is closed don't be surprised.