MouseEvent: ctrlKey property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The MouseEvent.ctrlKey read-only property is a boolean value that indicates whether the ctrl key was pressed or not when a given mouse event occurs.

On Macintosh keyboards, this key is labeled the control key. Also, note that on a Mac, a click combined with the control key is intercepted by the operating system and used to open a context menu, so ctrlKey is not detectable on click events.

Value

A boolean value, where true indicates that the key is pressed, and false indicates that the key is not pressed.

Examples

This example logs the ctrlKey property when you trigger a mousemove event.

HTML

html
<p id="log">The ctrl key was pressed while the cursor was moving: false</p>

JavaScript

js
const log = document.querySelector("#log");
window.addEventListener("mousemove", logKey);

function logKey(e) {
  log.textContent = `The ctrl key was pressed while the cursor was moving: ${e.ctrlKey}`;
}

Result

Specifications

Specification
UI Events
# dom-mouseevent-ctrlkey

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also