capturing all keystroke??

[Jigar Gosar]

is there a way to capture all keystrokes, in an java app, even though the app is not under keyboard focus???

actually i want to write an java application which runs in background and should pop on screen when i press a key combo such as alt-shift-p so something like that, can it be done with java.

also i m planning to write a java app, that would launch my fav apps at press of a keystroke, even if that app dosenot have keyboard focus.

i m not in position to write native code in c/c++,
and it would be ok if the solution is windows specific.

please help

[Lionel Badiou]

Hi Jigar,

Your project sounds too close to the OS for Java developpement. Howewer, you may consider using Windows' system tray to activate your background application with a click. To achieve that, I suggest you to check theses packages :

- http://jeans.studentenweb.org/java/trayicon/trayicon.html
- http://systray.sourceforge.net/
- http://www.javaapis.com/jtray/

Best regards,

[David Mace]

Yeah, unfortunately Lionel is right on this one. It's not possible to trap the keystrokes unless a container of some sort has focus. I know that you said you can't do native C/C++, but that would be a solution to your problem... i.e. writing some native code to trap the keystrokes and calling this native code through JNI.

David