Improve Shortcut.matches_event() not matching InputEventKey events precisely

[Jowan-Spooner]

As explained in godotengine/godot#97048 Shortcut.matches_event() a Shortcut setup with an InputEventKey event currently ignores the InputEventKey.pressed property and will always return true for both pressed and released variants of that event. This is easy to workaround, but unintuitive.

Intuitively I setup a shortcut like this:

Then checked for the shortcut like this:

func _input(event:InputEvent) -> void:
	if shortcut.matches_event(event):
		do_something()

However this will trigger twice for any InputEventKey which is not what you want for a shortcut and feels unintuitive because you can change the pressed property of the InputEventKey but that has no effect unless you check it manually like this:

func _input(event:InputEvent) -> void:
	if shortcut.matches_event(event) and event.pressed == shortcut.events[0].pressed:
		do_something()
		accept_event()

Apparently this is intended (not sure what for) and standard (InputEvent.matches()) does this too. I don't know of the use cases of InputEvent.matches() but at least for shortcuts this feels strange.

Interestingly the same is true for InputEventKey.echo. Also something uncommon for shortcuts and something you have to check manually.

Maybe the most intuitive solution would be to hide pressed, echo and similar "event state" properties from the inspector cause editing/seeing them is probably what confused me. However I assume this is not a good solution either.

Not sure how to best solve this, but the current workflow is confusing.

[AThousandShips]

There's a simple workaround for this, allowing you to do any variation on what you want matched:

func my_check(list_event: InputEvent, check_event: InputEvent, exact: bool, check_pressed: bool, check_echo: bool) -> bool:
    return list_event and list_event.is_match(check_event, exact) and (not check_pressed or list_event.is_pressed() == check_event.is_pressed()) and (not check_echo or list_event.is_echo() == check_event.is_echo())

func _input(event: InputEvent) -> void:
	if shortcut.events.any(my_check.bind(event, true, true, true)):
		do_something()

For example, or just configure as you wish

For comparison, this is the code of the actual check:

bool Shortcut::matches_event(const Ref<InputEvent> &p_event) const {
	Ref<InputEventShortcut> ies = p_event;
	if (ies.is_valid()) {
		if (ies->get_shortcut().ptr() == this) {
			return true;
		}
	}

	for (int i = 0; i < events.size(); i++) {
		Ref<InputEvent> ie = events[i];
		bool valid = ie.is_valid() && ie->is_match(p_event);

		// Stop on first valid event - don't need to check further.
		if (valid) {
			return true;
		}
	}

	return false;
}

[Jowan-Spooner]

Yes, this is a good workaround 👍.

It seems to me that you'd often (or mostly?) want to match a shortcut while also matching pressed and echo (wanting to trigger shortcuts on echo events seems to be an unlikely use-case tbh) so maybe a utility method that does a typical shortcut check (checking both pressed and echo) could be added?

Again, not really necessary, but Shortcut.matches_event() isn't really necessary in the first place as it can be worked around with the same method you've proposed.

[AThousandShips]

I disagree, and you'd usually check for pressed before checking this, that's how it is normally done in the engine itself, like so:

if event and event.is_pressed() and not event.is_echo():
    if shortcut_copy.matches_event(event):
        do_cut()
    elif shortcut_paste.matches_event(event):
        do_paste()
    ...

It's be a waste of processing to check it for each shortcut

[AThousandShips]

And this would be sufficient as you'd normally never mix events with and without echo or mixed pressed/released like this, having the code behave the same way both on release and on press for different events (for example, do the same action on pressing X and releasing Y), or one event with and one event without echo (for example, for only the first press of X but for every echo update when holding down Y)