I've been searching for a while and everybody seems to think this is not possible using just Java, so I'll give SO a shot ;)
Is there any way to have my Java application listen for events (key events in particular) while another unrelated application has window focus? In my situation, I'm looking to detect when the user has pressed the 'Pause' key on the keyboard even though my Java application does not have focus.
I've heard some people mention that the only way is to write some C code and use JNI. Just curious if anybody knew of a way to avoid that? Or, if not, at least a really nice tutorial on the c/JNI stuff?
Thanks
It's my understanding that this can't be done. At a fundamental level, the JVM only generates events for O/S events it receives, and it only receives O/S input events when it has focus.
I am sure you could use JNI to trigger the O/S to generate events for all input, but that would be very O/S dependent.
+1. I would be very surprised if there were a way to do this without JNI or some other access outside the JVM.
You can use classes from com.melloware.jintellitype package. Than you can capcure Key inputs all the time. But you need to add some .dll file for native functions.