Keyboard¶
DOSBox Staging captures your keyboard input and passes it straight to the emulated DOS environment — most keys just work without any fuss.
The one wrinkle is that your host operating system intercepts certain key
combinations (Alt+Tab, Cmd+H, etc.) before DOSBox ever sees them.
The keyboard_capture setting lets you override this, so DOSBox gets first
dibs on those keys. This is especially useful in fullscreen mode or when a
game relies on key combinations that collide with OS shortcuts.
All key bindings can be customised through the key mapper (Ctrl+F1 on Windows/Linux, Cmd+F1 on macOS). See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list of default bindings.
DOS keyboard layout and code pages¶
The settings above control how your physical keyboard is captured and mapped by DOSBox Staging. The DOS-level keyboard layout — which characters your keys actually produce inside DOS programs — is a separate matter; see Keyboard layout and code pages.
At the DOS prompt, use the KEYB command to change the keyboard layout and
code page together (run KEYB /? for details), or the CHCP command to
switch just the code page while keeping the current keyboard layout (run
CHCP /? for details). This is useful when a game assumes a certain code
page — usually 437 — but you want the keyboard layout unchanged (for example,
the game Tommy’s Manor).
Configuration settings¶
The keyboard capture setting is configured in the [sdl] configuration
section.
keyboard_layout¶
- See
keyboard_layout.
keyboard_capture¶
-
Capture system keyboard shortcuts. When enabled, most system shortcuts are captured and sent to DOSBox Staging instead of being intercepted by the host OS. Examples of captured shortcuts:
- Alt+Tab (task switching on all platforms)
- Ctrl+Esc (Start menu on Windows)
- Ctrl+F4 (virtual desktop switching on KDE)
- Ctrl+Left (show desktop on macOS)
This is particularly useful for Windows 3.1 and DOS programs that use key combinations which conflict with your OS shortcuts.
Possible values:
on,offdefault