For anyone visiting this issue in 2025, tracking the keyboard state requires setting:

event_loop.listen_device_events(DeviceEvents::Always);

to ensure device events are delivered while your application does not have focus.

It is still not possible to correctly initialize the state of each key without the ability to query that state at application startup. The state of a key can be tracked correctly after the first key press or release.

An example with winit 0.30.9

use std::collections::HashMap;

use winit::application::ApplicationHandler;
use winit::event::{DeviceEvent, DeviceId, ElementState, RawKeyEvent, WindowEvent};
use winit::event_loop::{ActiveEventLoop, DeviceEvents, EventLoop};
use winit::keyboard::{KeyCode, PhysicalKey};
use winit::window::{Window, WindowId};

#[derive(Default)]
struct App {
    window: Option<Window>,
    keys: HashMap<KeyCode, ElementState>,
}

impl ApplicationHandler for App {
    fn resumed(&mut self, event_loop: &ActiveEventLoop) {
        self.window = Some(event_loop.create_window(Default::default()).unwrap());
    }

    fn device_event(
        &mut self,
        _event_loop: &ActiveEventLoop,
        _device_id: DeviceId,
        event: DeviceEvent,
    ) {
        if let DeviceEvent::Key(RawKeyEvent {
            physical_key: PhysicalKey::Code(key_code),
            state,
        }) = event
        {
            self.keys.insert(key_code, state);
            println!("{:#?}", self.keys);
        }
    }

    fn window_event(
        &mut self,
        event_loop: &ActiveEventLoop,
        _window_id: WindowId,
        event: WindowEvent,
    ) {
        if let WindowEvent::CloseRequested = event {
            event_loop.exit();
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    let event_loop = EventLoop::new().unwrap();
    event_loop.listen_device_events(DeviceEvents::Always);
    let mut app = App::default();
    event_loop.run_app(&mut app).unwrap();
}

No getkey()? #1010

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