chrome.experimental.keybinding

Contents

1. Manifest
2. Usage
3. API reference: chrome.experimental.keybinding
   1. Events
      1. onCommand

The keybinding API allows you to add keyboard shortcuts that trigger actions in your extension. An action can be opening the browser action or page action popup or sending a command to the extension.

Manifest

In addition to the "experimental" permission you must declare the "keybinding" permission in your extension's manifest to use this API and set manifest_version to (at least) 2.

{
  "name": "My extension",
  ...
  "permissions": [
    "experimental",
    "keybinding",
  ],
  ...
}

Usage

The keybinding API allows you to define specific commands, and bind them to a default key combination. Each command your extension accepts must be listed in the manifest as an attribute of the 'commands' manifest key. Note: Combinations that involve Ctrl+Alt are not permitted in order to avoid conflicts with the AltGr key.

{
  "name": "My extension",
  ...
  "commands": {
    "toggle-feature-foo": {
      "suggested_key": {
        "default": "Ctrl+Shift+Y",
        "mac": "Command+Shift+Y"
      },
      "description": "Toggle feature foo"
    },
    "_execute_browser_action": {
      "suggested_key": {
        "windows": "Ctrl+Shift+Y",
        "mac": "Command+Shift+Y",
        "chromeos": "Ctrl+Shift+U",
        "linux": "Ctrl+Shift+J"
      }
    },
    "_execute_page_action": {
      "suggested_key": {
        "default": "Ctrl+E"
        "windows": "Alt+P",
        "mac": "Option+P",
      }
    }
  },
  ...
}

In your background page, you can bind a handler to each of the commands defined in the manifest (except for '_execute_browser_action' and '_execute_page_action') via onCommand.addListener. For example:

chrome.experimental.keybinding.onCommand.addListener(function(command) {
  console.log('Command:', command);
});

The '_execute_browser_action' and '_execute_page_action' commands are reserved for the action of opening your extension's popups. They won't normally generate events that you can handle. If you need to take action based on your popup opening, consider listening for an 'onDomReady' event inside your popup's code.