Keyboard

GDevelop gives access to all inputs made on the keyboard. This includes conditions to check if a key was pressed, held, or released, and an expression to retrieve the last key pressed.

Warning

Keyboard conditions do not work with on-screen touch keyboards on mobile devices. When targeting mobile or touch-screen platforms, use mouse/touch conditions instead (or gamepad conditions with a virtual joystick).

Key pressed

This condition is true as long as the key is held down. It is useful for continuous actions such as moving a character — the action runs every frame while the key is down.

Key just pressed

This condition is true only for the single frame when the key is first pressed down. Use this for one-shot actions like jumping or firing a weapon, where you want the action to trigger once per key press rather than every frame.

Tip

If a player complains that holding down the jump key makes them jump repeatedly, switch from Key pressed to Key just pressed.

Key released

This condition is true only for the single frame when the key is released. Useful for actions that should trigger at the moment the player lifts their finger.

Any key pressed / Any key released

These conditions are true when any keyboard key is pressed or released, regardless of which one. Handy for "press any key to continue" prompts.

Use the Last key pressed expression to find out which key it was — for example, to display it in a text object or store it in a variable.

Key names

Keys are identified by name strings. Some common names:

Key	Name string
Arrow keys	Left, Right, Up, Down
Letter keys	a–z (lowercase)
Number row	Num0–Num9
Numpad digits	Numpad0–Numpad9
Function keys	F1–F12
Modifier keys	LShift, RShift, LControl, RControl, LAlt, RAlt
Space / Enter	Space, Return
Other	Escape, Tab, Back (Backspace), Delete, Insert, Pause

The GDevelop event editor provides a key picker, so you rarely need to type names manually. The Key pressed (text expression) and Key released (text expression) variants accept the name as a text expression, which is useful when the key to check is stored in a variable.

Last key pressed

The LastPressedKey() expression returns the name of the most recently pressed key as a string. For example, if the player presses the left arrow key, the expression returns "Left".

Reference

All actions, conditions and expressions are listed in the keyboard reference page.