Using <kbd> for fun and profit
There’s this HTML element meant for marking up keyboard keys named kbd
. Obviously it can be styled with CSS so why not use it to make those elements look a bit more like hardware or the iOS and Android software keys.
The above picture might be blurry depending on the device you’re using so here’s a live rendered demo:
Light Dark iOS An dro id
They are completely styled with CSS3 so they’re sharp on all screens no matter how high the dpi. Have a look at the full demo or grab the project folder with the CSS & LESS files from GitHub. The code is under the MIT license so you’re free to use it in any personal or commercial project.
Usage
CSS
Just drop in the kbdftw.css
in your head
:
If you want to use the Android key style, include roboto.css before:
You also need to add all the Roboto font files from assets/fonts to your project.
LESS
There’re some variables in the kbdfun.less
file you can customize.
For the Android style, there’s roboto.less
as include at the end. But the font files won’t load unless you uncomment the .font-roboto
line in kbdftw.less. This is to make sure, users won’t download all the font files if you don’t use the Android style.
Markup
The default styling are light keys with Lucida Grande as font:
becomes Q
Add a dark class to get the dark keys:
becomes Q
Adding an ios or android class gives a replica of those system keys. Android uses three different colors on the default keyboard.
becomes Q
becomes Q
becomes Q
becomes Q
I’ve let the default display: inline
intact so all padding on the kbd
elements won’t affect the line-height of the surrounding text. This leads to problems when you want to use them over multiple lines so just make them display: inline-block
in this scenario.
Pro Tip: if you want to replicate all Mac keyboards after 2003 you have to get VAG rounded for the font.
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Hit me up @krema@mas.to
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