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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T00:55:05+00:00

I want to write a program that responds when I press a certain key

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I want to write a program that responds when I press a certain key on the keyboard. However, there will be a completely unrelated full-screen program running in the foreground and my program won’t have the window focus.

So, basically, what I want to do is start my program and have it run in the background, then start the full-screen program. And then I want to be able to get my program to do stuff in the background when I press a certain key.

Is there a way to do this in Java? If not, is there any way at all to do it?

My platform is Windows 7.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A keystroke is an O/S event. You can write a listener in C++ using hooks, then create a JNI interface on top of it.

    Lookup MSDN entry for “SetWindowsHookEx” function for hooking procedure.

    If you don’t want to fuss with JNI, consider implementing the listener in Visual C++ or Visual Basic and cross-compiling the .NET binaries into Java bytecode. Here is a free tool to do that: http://www.ikvm.net/

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