Question

I found the method addAWTKeyListener in the class Toolkit, but I can’t get it to work properly, whether or not the window has focus. My code is as follows:

import java.awt.AWTEvent;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.event.AWTEventListener;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;


public class KeyTest {

    public static void main(String[] args){
    Thread t = new Thread(){
        @Override
        public void run() {
        System.out.println("STARTING");
        Toolkit kit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
        kit.addAWTEventListener(new AWTEventListener(){

            @Override
            public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent event) {
            System.out.println("EVENT");
            if(event instanceof KeyEvent){
                KeyEvent kEvent = (KeyEvent) event;
                System.out.println(kEvent.getKeyCode());
            }
            }

        }, AWTEvent.KEY_EVENT_MASK);
        while(true);
        }
    };
    t.start();
    }

}

Is there something I’m doing wrong? I get to the point that STARTING prints and there are no errors. The even is simply not called.

Answer 1

I may be wrong as I’m certainly not an expert, but as far as I know what you’re trying to do isn’t possible in Java.

Are you trying to capture a key click using a Java program, but without creating a window? Part of Java’s security, and this is what I may be wrong on, is that it can only listen to events inside Java windows created by that particular Java program.

So if you were trying to make something key-logger-esque that runs in the background and captured a key press, it wouldn’t be able to do that.

I wish I could give you a more concrete answer but I hope this helped.