HTML `<kbd>` Tag

Wrap your keyboard command text with <kbd>. Great to use especially in documentations! It's more semantically correct & allows you to target it to apply some nice styling. You can also use this tag for other user input such as voice input or text entry device 🙌

HTML

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd>

Styling

CSS

kbd {
  border: 1px solid lime;
  border-radius: 5px;
  padding: 5px;
}

Output

ctrl

Default Styling

Here's how it looks like without any styling:

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd>

<p>Ctrl</p>

Output

As you can tell, it looks quite plain 😅. It simply just has the monspace font. If you open it up in your dev tools, this is what you will get:

/* Default Style */
kbd {
  font-family: monospace;
}

Auto Styling in GitHub & Dev Markdown

But something interesting I discovered. If you use the standard <kbd> in GitHub's or Dev.to's markdown. It looks very similar to the style I have in my code tidbit. This is great to add some pizzaz to your README files 💃 Another reason to use the correct HTML tags 😆

Use Case

This is super useful when writing documentations. I remember I use to always just used the <code> tag and then apply some sort of class to target it for styling. But after doing some googling, I found this a more semantic solution, <kbd>. That's why Google is a programmer's best friend 😂

❌ Bad

To copy text, you can use the keyboard shortcut:

<code>Ctrl</code> + <code>c</code>

✅ Good

To copy text, you can use the keyboard shortcut:

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>c</kbd>

code vs kbd

So I mentioned that I use to use the <code> tag. Let's look at what that does.

From your browser, it might not make any difference with the default styling. They both are using the monospace font-family. But semantically they are identified differently.

<kbd>: Text that indicates user input from a keyboard, voice input, or any other text entry device.

<code>: Text that indicates a short fragment of a computer code.

Community Input

💬 What other HTML5 tags should I cover next? 😀

• @JelteHomminga: <details>
• @JimSaiya: <samp>
• @funksweat: <canvas>
• @tiagombp: <meter>

fieldset

@percy_burton: Learnt more about fieldset recently. Thought it was just for radio buttons or checkboxes, but can be to group any related form items, I believe. Great for Accessibility too 😀

@JelteHomminga: And useful to set the whole set of fields to disabled instead of doing that for each input separately

Resources

• MDN Web Docs: kbd
• MDN Web Docs: code
• w3schools: kbd
• w3schools: code
• Stack Overflow: What are the differences between kbd, samp and code in HTML
• HTML Spec: kbd
• HTML kbd Tag

—

Thanks for reading ❤
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Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I wasn't aware of the kbd tag until this PR...

Added <kbd> tag support to markdown editors in article posts and comm… #1761

deadlybyte commented on Feb 07, 2019

…ents.

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [x] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Added tag support to markdown editors in article posts and comments.

Related Tickets & Documents

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

View on GitHub

I'm glad we support it with DEV markdown as it is super nice for communicating key strokes, as you've described. You need to use the HTML tags of <kbd>ctrl</kbd>. It's odd to me that nobody standardized a markdown-first way to do this.

[Samantha Ming]

I was pleasantly surprise to discover this! So I had to update my code notes with images instead to show the default output. You totally spoil and make our blog post super nice right out of the box. Thank youuu 👏👏

[lucasprag]

Wow, working with html for awhile, still so many tags I don't know about, that's super cool, thanks for sharing =)

I found out about <progress> a few months ago as well 🤯, so maybe this one would be really nice to share.

[Emmy | Pixi]

TIL about <progress>

[Samantha Ming]

i can’t believe I forgot about that! I’ve used it before too. Alright let me add that to the list, thanks! 👏

[Fernando Maia]

Very well explained. You not only brought the information on why one should use kbd, but also brought some great examples on how to use it and a comparison with the code tag.

[Samantha Ming]

Thanks for the encouraging feedback! So happy you found it helpful 😊

[Jon McLaren]

Should actually be

Ctrl + c

[Samantha Ming]

Nice! The double embed 👍

[Jon McLaren]

Didn't realize it would output the code.

I meant Kbd is supposed to be wrapped in another kbd if used for key combos.

[David Wickes]

Nice one Samantha!

[Samantha Ming]

Thanks for reading my post 😊

[Rohan Sawant]

Awesome! I had no idea this was a thing!

[Samantha Ming]

Me too! HTML is filled with goodies 👏

[Samantha Ming]

Nice! Perfect use case 😆

[Tim Trautman]

Very cool -- I had no idea this existed.

[Samantha Ming]

Thanks! Glad you found it helpful 😊