1. Windows
  2. Reacting to Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows

Reacting to Keyboard Shortcuts

Desktop applications can react to keyboard shortcuts that are triggered by the user. While the ToDesktop Builder UI allows you to use a keyboard shortcut to toggle window visibility, the ToDesktop API opens up a wider range of behaviour.

A user interface checkbox for toggling window visibility

In this short guide, we'll use the API to replicate the behaviour for toggling window visibility. Install the API in your target project:

        npm install @todesktop/client-core

      

With that installed, we'll use the globalShortcut namespace to listen to the CommandOrControl+Shift+. shortcut:

        import { globalShortcut, nativeWindow } from '@todesktop/client-core';

globalShortcut.register('CommandOrControl+Shift+.', async () => {
  // ...
});

      
INFO

Visit Electron's accelerator documentation for a complete list of valid shortcuts.

Inside the body of the function, we'll use the imported nativeWindow namespace to handle changing window visibility.

        import { globalShortcut, nativeWindow } from '@todesktop/client-core';

globalShortcut.register('CommandOrControl+Shift+.', async () => {
  if (await nativeWindow.isVisible()) {
    await nativeWindow.hide();
  } else {
    await nativeWindow.show();
  }
});

      

And that's essentially it! While this was a simple example, you have access to the entire todesktop API to experiment with. For a more complex example, visit our tutorial that uses keyboard shortcuts to extract selected text.