How to Detect Keypress using JavaScript ?

Last Updated : 05 Aug, 2025

In this article, keyboard detection is performed using HTML and CSS. HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language". HTML language helps the developer to create and design web page elements like links, sections, paragraphs, headings, and blockquotes for web applications. CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheet". Cascading style sheets are used to design web page layouts. The styles are defined to give styles to tables, sizes, and texts. JavaScript is a scripting programming language used on the client and server side, which makes the web pages talk and communicate with each other. All of the above technologies are used to implement keypress detection. Program editor applications like Atom or Sublime Text can be used to compile the programs.

Example: In this example, we will create a program to detect keypresses using JavaScript.

keypresses

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <style>
        body {
            font-family: monospace, arial;
            font-size: 38px;
            text-align: center;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="demo"></div>
    <script>
        window.onload = function() {
            var demo = document.getElementById('demo');
            var value = 0;
            var space_bar = 32;
            var right_arrow = 39;

            window.onkeydown = function(gfg) {
                if (gfg.keyCode === space_bar) {
                    value++;
                    demo.innerHTML = value;
                }
                if (gfg.keyCode === right_arrow) {
                    alert("Welcome to GeeksForGeeks!");
                }
            };
        };
    </script>
</body>
</html>

Here,

var space_bar = 32

and

var right_arrow = 39

are actually the key codes that correspond to the specific key. Whenever the space bar or the right arrow is clicked, the HTML will detect the type of click and respond by the number of times clicked or by a message.

Output: A number gets displayed when the space bar is once clicked. When the right arrow is clicked, the page responds with a message.