XF 2.3 Disable or suppress xenforo shortcuts?

[Robert9]

We need to use A–Z keys inside a popup/menu for navigation (jumping to items by first letter).

The problem is that XenForo’s global shortcuts still fire — for example pressing “m” also opens the user menu in the background.

What is the correct way to prevent global keyboard shortcuts from triggering while a popup/menu is active?

Is there an official method to temporarily disable or suppress those shortcuts?

 

[zenvibe]

The simplest way to handle this is to stop the keydown event from bubbling up to the document level where XenForo's global shortcuts listen.

Add a keydown listener on your popup element that catches letter keys before they reach the global handler:

yourPopupElement.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
if (e.key.length === 1 && e.key.match(/[a-z]/i)) {
e.stopPropagation();
}
});

This blocks A-Z from reaching XenForo's shortcut system while your popup is open, but still lets Escape, Tab, and arrow keys work normally.

If you're building a proper XF add-on with XF.Element, you could also look into temporarily detaching the shortcut handlers when your popup opens and reattaching on close — but honestly the stopPropagation approach is cleaner and won't break if XenForo changes their shortcut internals in a future update.