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

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
ctrlKey

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support

See also