Question

Notice while on Google’s homepage, with no focus on any element, pressing BACKSPACE will put the focus into the search toolbar instead of navigating back.

How can I accomplish this?

I keep running into this problem with users in my app. They don’t have focus on any element and hit BACKSPACE which throws them out of the app.

Answer 1

I would bind an event handler to keydown and prevent the default action of that event if we’re dealing with the backspace key outside of a textarea or input:

$(document).on("keydown", function (e) {
    if (e.which === 8 && !$(e.target).is("input, textarea")) {
        e.preventDefault();
    }
});