Check whether shift key is pressed

Question

I'm programming an application which should, when started, check whether the shift key is pressed. For that I have created a small class which is responsible for that:

import java.awt.KeyEventDispatcher;
import java.awt.KeyboardFocusManager;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;

public class KeyboardListener {

    private static boolean isShiftDown;

    static {
        KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager().addKeyEventDispatcher(
            new KeyEventDispatcher() {
                public boolean dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent e) {
                    isShiftDown = e.isShiftDown();
                    return false;
                }
            });
    }

    public static boolean isShiftDown() {
        return isShiftDown;
    }

}

However, it seems that this is not working if the shift key was already pressed when the application started up. The following check always executes the else case.

if (KeyboardListener.isShiftDown()) {
    // ...
} else {
    // this always gets executed
}

Is there a way of checking whether the shift key is pressed if it was already pressed when the application started? I know this is possible using WinAPI, but I would prefer a Javaish way of doing it.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It does not seem possible, since it requires the application to poll for the initial status, opposed to the model of events used by AWT/Swing.