Override Chrome keyboard shortcuts in a user script

Question

I wrote a user script that performs a certain operation on selected text in a textarea when pressing CTRL+SHIFT+B.

This is done by registering a keypress event for the textarea and then checking the pressed key. To prevent the browser from handling the key combination I'm using the preventDefault() method which works fine in Firefox (the Library window is not opened but my code is executed instead).

However, in Chrome that key combination opens the bookmarks bar and the keypress event is not even triggered.

I wonder if there's a way to create such a shortcut in Chrome. It needs to work with a userscript - a real extension is not an option since I'd prefer not to maintain two different "versions" for Firefox and Chrome.

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 24 '12 at 23:19

7

Apparently, the Chrome UI triggers off of keydown instead of keypress (This Quirksmode article may suggest why -- keypress is supposed to fire when an actual character is being inserted).

So changing the appropriate line to:

$(document).on('keydown', '.wmd-input', function(e) {

Seems to work on both FF and Chrome.

answered Jun 24 '12 at 23:19

Brock Adams

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Will this override / disable the original keyboard shortcut or will they both fire? – Patrick Jun 14 '15 at 01:22
@Patrick, Depends. look up `preventDefault()`, `stopPropagation()`, `stopImmediatePropagation()`, etc. – Brock Adams Jun 14 '15 at 02:31

Override Chrome keyboard shortcuts in a user script

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