Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

NSEvent

We discussed NSEvent in terms of mouse events in the previous chapter. Here are some of the properties commonly used when getting information about a keyboard event:

var characters: String! { get }

Returns the characters created by the event.

var ARepeat: Bool { get }

true if the key event is a repeat caused by the user holding the key down; false if the key event is new.

var keyCode: UInt16 { get }

Returns the code for the keyboard key that caused the event.

var modifierFlags: NSEventModifierFlags { get }

Returns an integer bit field indicating the modifier keys in effect for the event. For information about what the bits of the integer mean, refer to the discussion in Chapter 18.