How to detect a key press in Java

Question

My son (aged 11) who is learning Java is going to enter a question and some code. He tells me he has not been able to find the answer to this question on the site. You will

Answer 1

There's a great library which works smoothly and it listens to global events. It's the only thing which worked without any issues for me: https://github.com/kwhat/jnativehook

It grabs every event in the system, pretty cool for any development.

You can use it like this:

package main;

import org.jnativehook.GlobalScreen;
import org.jnativehook.NativeHookException;
import org.jnativehook.keyboard.NativeKeyEvent;
import org.jnativehook.keyboard.NativeKeyListener;

class MyKeyboard implements NativeKeyListener {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            GlobalScreen.registerNativeHook();
        } catch (NativeHookException ex) {
            System.err.println("There was a problem registering the native hook.");
            System.err.println(ex.getMessage());

            System.exit(1);
        }

        GlobalScreen.addNativeKeyListener(new MyKeyboard());

        // Now press any keys and look at the output
    }

    @Override
    public void nativeKeyPressed(NativeKeyEvent e) {
    }

    @Override
    public void nativeKeyTyped(NativeKeyEvent nke) {
    }

    @Override
    public void nativeKeyReleased(NativeKeyEvent nke) {
    }

}