Question

I currently made a link that I attach the “click” event to ajax some content. How do I make it so that the user can open it in a new window or tab if they want (either through context-menu or shortcuts)?

Answer 1

If you provide a valid href-attribute, users should be able to open the link in a new tab by selecting “Open in new tab” from the context menu.

To detect if a user clicked on the link while holding down any “special key” (e.g. alt, shift, “meta”, this last one is the one you want I guess), use the click event’s properties provided by jQuery: see this example on jsfiddle and the respective section in the jQuery docs. Hope it helps to catch the CMD-clicks commonly used to open a link in a new tab/window.

$("a").on("click",function(e){
    if(e.metaKey) {
        // the user probably wants to open the link in a new tab
    } else {
        // simple click, so do your AJAX call here
    }
});

Also, see this “Key event properties” table for more information. Seems jQuery sets the metaKey property to event.ctrlKey if its undefined (search for “metaKey” in jQuery’s source).