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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T18:16:43+00:00

Is it possible to determine whether there is a numeric keypad connected to the

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Is it possible to determine whether there is a numeric keypad connected to the system? Desktop keyboards typically have numpads, while laptops typically don’t (though they put numpad keys in the normal keyboard, activated with Num Lock). Does the operating system know whether the numpad keys are physically separate? And if so, is that information exposed to programs somehow?

It would be useful to know this to determine appropriate default key-bindings. If it’s not available then I’ll either have to pick a conservative default (not using the numpad), which means a slightly irritating extra configuration step to get nicer behaviour for people with separate numpads, or I’ll have to pick a non-conservative default and irritate the people without numpads…

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  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t believe you can query for keyboard capabilities but iirc there is a “numpad” key. 😉

    You should be able to query if Num is on or off, but it being off won’t be a foolproof way to know that there is no numeric keypad.

    What you could probably do is detect keys being pressed on a numpad and subliminaly trick the user into doing so, which would identify said characteristic.

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